February 2005 Archives

“End users want to achieve their goals with minimum of cognitive load and a maximum of enjoyment.” ~ Marchionini. Why? Because search users are nitwits. Mike asks us to consider the following. What if someone goes into a travel store and when asked what he is looking for, he answers “travel”. He goes on to describe it takes to get ranked in the top ten. Social sciences and bibliometry is also mentioned on the screen and have existence for a long time, even before search engines. They are being applied today in the algorithms that are created for search engines. The web is a social network he continues. Social networks have been extensively researched long before the web. He describes citation analysis and the how this is applied to in search engines. There is a difference between a citation and a reference.

Hyperlink analysis algorithms make either one or both of these simple assumptions. Assumption 1 – A hyperlink from page A to page B. Co citations, if a page C cites pages A and B, then A and B are said to be co-cited by C. Pages A and B being co-cited by many other pages is evidence. There are two main algorithms based on links. PageRank (Google): Each page on the web has a measure of prestige that is independent of any information need or query i.e. keyword independent. Roughly speaking, the prestige of a page is proportional to the prestige of the sum of the prestige scores of pages. HITS or Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search. Problem is that neither of these algorithms work.

The problem with HITS. Topic drift, nepotistic linking, and runtime analysis. Mike says there are three steps to success. They cracked the problem relating to time of a search from 11 seconds to instant. He describes Teoma and subject specific popularity.
Adventures in search algorithms: What happened next? Both Krishna Bharat and Monica Hensinger join Google. Mike believes that Florida that moved from keyword independent to keyword dependent.
Ending joke:
There is a guy trapped in the desert and is looking for life. He finds a man face down in the sand, with a bag on his back. He thinks what was in the bag that would have saved him. Answer: Parachute

Next up was Rahul Lahiri he presents some of the properties that Ask Jeeves controls. Today they are ranked #7 on the web and have done exceedingly well since this time last year. What is their mission: relevance. He goes into general link analysis methods. The challenge is to discovering what the links are about. A link from page A to page B (or C) is a vote or recommendation by the author or page A for the page B (or C). The problem is that if you have a link with the anchor text budget, you don’t know what the budget means. Was it a budget for Budget rent-a-car or budget for someone’s companies?? That’s a problem obviously. He continues that organizing into local subject communities of sites. This is how Teoma views that web. Some of the challenges that they face is that solving the problem in real-time. 200 ms (milliseconds) to do this computation for each query, millions of times per day. You also have to identify the communities. The link structure of the web is noisy. Hubs link to topic specific pages. An example of topic focused vs. broad topic areas. Topic focused is a search for “buffalo” and broad topic areas is a search for “bay area airports”. Some of the benefits are that smaller enthusiast sites get a chance to come up to the top of the search listings (example search: fantasy football).
The power of communities is a better vision, expert validation, contextualization, and better user experience.

Next Dr. E. Garcia, a pioneer that has allowed us to better understand the search engines as marketers was next to present. His plane has been delayed till tomorrow because of weather (its snowing heavily here), BUT there is a voice over for his presentation. Tapes starts. He is going to discuss grasping co-occurrence. Co-occurrence suggests association of relatedness. Side note: People are leaving because the audio isn’t too great. But not too many as there is a good amount of interest for this. Back to co-occurrence. Co-occurrence can be: Global, Local, or Fractal. This presentation is highly technical, and while I understand his work, it’s hard to follow. I am trying to get what I can, as its requiring very detailed listening and comprehension at this point. I apologize for any errors in this document.

Example of the case of “Hawaii” which is semantically connected to aloha, Hawaiian, Maui. C-indices can be used to estimate the relative presence of targeted keywords across search engines. He gives another example of “comida + mexicana” that are semantically connected. Example: C-indices can be used to monitor keyword trends, word patterns and topics in time. He goes on to talk about competitive words. Based on his research the example suggest that many competitive queries in Google tend to exhibit C12 indices. His research indicates that overused queries tend to exhibit unusually high C-indices while unrelated terms in a query tend to exhibit very small c-indexes. He gives the example of “guacamole optimization” with a low c-index of 0.12. On to term sequencing: EF-ratios. He talks about various types of queries such as a findall and exact and how order and frequency matter. He goes on to give the example that EF-ratios can be used to estimate the relative frequency of natural sequences and phrases in a source. So what about candidate sequences? These EF ratios can be used to examine how easy or difficult would be to rank for a given sequence in a given search. Keyword competitiveness is specific to each search engine. Some search engines return documents whose sequence can be found. When queried in EXACT mode, some searches return docs in which the queried term can be found. What is it separated by, delimiter (hyphen, underscore), space, or stopwords (in, of, with). So to recap, co-occurrence theory can be used to understand semantic associations between: terms, products, services.

Q: Interested in how we will be searching in 5-10 years time? Personalization?
A: Where is search going? Mike did an interview from the founder of Teoma. It was interesting he says. The most interesting is that he said they need to get up 10 steps up the ladder, currently we are 3-4. The one thing that will change this, will be personalization. It’s misunderstood, personalization. It’s not giving you a search just for you. Its about returning results for your peer group. They can start to tailor the search specifically to you. There is data now using genetic algorithms and others set that are using these to create search engines. Mike concludes the more information we give the search engines, the better our experience will be.

Orion couldn't make it due to a mud slide, he will be here tomorrow. They will try to present his presentation with voice overs.

Mike Grehan was up first, he deleted his presentation last night. So he had to restart from scratch, but everyone sympathized. He shows the SEW Forums, and explains that people are very interested in "this stuff." He highlights the keywords co-occurance thread that had 46,401 views, so there is a lot of interest. He said Orion deserves a ton of credit. What are the ages of my three sons? He starts a story that all of his three sons are having a birthday today. He then gives clues to figure out his sons ages, the product of the ages of my sons is 36 and the sum of their ages is equal to the number of windows in the building and the last clue is one son has blue eyes. Mike then gives down a break down on how to figure with equations. the answer is 9, 2, and 2. The last clue, about the blue eyes, said there was an oldest son so the 6, 6, and 1 wouldn't be the right answer. He explains that engines want the most relevant results, which is hard "because end users are search nitwits!" He explained that someone who walks into a travel store and tells the clerk "travel" he will kick you out but search engines respond. The "abundance" problem, too many results, which are the best results, which are the most relevant? Social networks have been extensively researched long before the Web. He briefly explains "Citation analysis", so we have a Web graphic, directed edges and undirected edges (co-citation). If you have questions about this, let me know. Then he discusses PageRank and HITS. PageRank he sums up, PageRank is keyword independent. HITS (Teoma) which is keyword dependent. Great way of explaining the difference. He says there is only one problem with these two solutions, "Neither of them work." He said the problem with PageRank, well they don't use it, so he skipped it. He then went on to HITS and said topic drift, nepotistic linking and runtime analysis are the three issues. The first two were corrected, but runtime analysis is still an issue. He said how AG from Ask Jeeves (Teoma) cracked it. He then put up a graph on the hubs and authorities. So what happened next? B&H algorithm died with AV, then those two went to Google and Hilltop came out. Then in Feb. 03, Google patented Local Link (Bharat). Then he went into Florida (nice little graph), he said it had a lot to do with Google moving from keyword independent to dependent. He throws up some links to advanced papers on this about the future. He finishes off his presentation with an other story. A guy is walking in a desert, he finds a dead guy on the sand with a bag on his back. What was in his bag, a parachute.

Next up was Ask Jeeves named Rahul Lahiri, he helped me out once with a relevancy issue a month ago. He said there is some overlap with Mike's presentation. He goes over the Ask properties and growth numbers. Ask's mission is relevance, index completeness, freshness, and structured data (smart answers). Algorithmic drives are content/text analysis, and link analysis. He focuses on the link side; and shows a graph of page a linking to page b and page c (mike showed something similar). Ask looks at what the "links are about". He goes into the hubs and authority thing. The key challenges are solving the problem in real-time and identifying the communities. He then gives examples of queries such as "buffalo" vs. "bay area airports". They need to weed out the noises from the good stuff. He explains that small enthusiast sites get a chance to rise to the top, which is great. They then can do a better job of identifying different communities, refine search.

Now they give Orion's, Dr. E. Garcia's presentation a try. It sounds like Nacho. Cool, its working. Nacho introduces it. Co-occurrence suggests association or relatedness. I'll summarize it later, very technical.

UPDATE:
First excuse me if I make major mistakes in my interpretation of the presentation. I hope Dr. G. (Orion) reviews this and makes any necessary corrections.

Orion's first slide went over some of the basics of co-occurences. Orion explains that co-occurences shows a type of "relatedness" between words. So if you have two terms that are often discussed or found on the same document, they tend to be more related. He then gives an example of the term "aloha". What does aloha make us think of? Hawaii is the correct answer. Orion then explains that this is important when conducting "keyword-brand associations." In Orion's second example he shows an equation he discussed in the forums; c12-index = (n12/(n1+n2-n12))x1000, he overlays an example of a k1 and k2 showing the n12 overlap in the middle as well as explains how an example of 3 keywords makes for a much more complex query in AND mode (n123). He then brings back the old example of "aloha hawaii" to explain "term associations". When you compute the values in Google of "aloha hawaii" versus "aloha indiana" or "aloha montana" you will notice the the C index is much higher with "aloha hawaii" (28.11) versus "aloha indiana" (3.23). This shows that aloha AND hawaii are more "semantically connected" then the other examples. He then shows how you can use the C-index computation to determine which engines would it be easier to target a specific keyword phrase, the higher the c-index, the more competitive that keyword phrase is in the engine, relative to other engines. Orion then explains that c-index can be used to monitor keyword trends over time, showed some very interesting slides to prove it. Orion's benchmark for a "competitive query" is one that has a c-index of above 25 points, he lists a number of those submitted to him via SEW Forums for a stufy he did several months ago. He then computed the c-index of some spam related keywords that were way above the 100 mark on the scale, neat stuff. Orion then explains that most engines use AND (FINDALL) mode as opposed to EXACT. When you look and compare both, you should find the results for EXACT mode within the FINDALL mode. The reason has something to do with order and proximity, where exact mode it does matter and findall it does not. Using this information, Orion defined a new ratio named "EF Ratio" which is equal to (n12 Exact Results/n12 FindALL Results) x 100. What the EF Ratio shows us is the "natural sequences" of words used. Meaning, how are words used in language, documents (real life). EF Ratios can be used to determine competitiveness of a keyword. The lower the number the less competitive it is. In fact, he showed that competitiveness for the same keyword phrases differ from search engine to search engine. The last slide we will save for those who were at the session.

Q & A:

LSI - Mike said that engines will use it, but he implied they are not at this time.

We spend a lot of time and money to get people to visit our websites? But what do we really know what users behave like. The room is really packed again. This looks like its going to be a great session to report on.
First up was Dr. Bonny Brown from Keynote Systems. She is going to be talking about customer experience management and how people use the web to conduct searches. About the concept of customer experience management. She asks if anyone out there has tried to interpret log files? This can be very difficult to intererpt their behavior. What are they doing? Did they not like the offer? Was it the wrong ad or audience?

To get the complete customer experience, you need a more complete picture. You need to start what the cusomter has already been exposed to. They have certain expectations. The gap is what creates the delight or disappointment. You need to understand their attitudes and reasons. Lastly the last compenent is to relate this information to making decisions. She has competitive benchmark studies that show the strengths and weakness. The mission is to help the companies understand what their strengths and weaknesses is. Understanding the why behind the strategy will help you apply it their websites. An example is vacation packages, they monitor their behavior as they navigate the website. Back to competitive benchmark studies. She took the leading search engines, and their were 2000 panelists, per site. That’s a lot of response! They have run this study twice, and see how these search engines are comparing against each other.

To get a view of how they see the behavior, is they invite panelists, and they login and search and surf the web using a browser compenent. They capture feedback and keywords they use. The customers viewpoint is that Google is #1. This is what customers are telling them. Then Yahoo #2 and MSN #3. They are seeing Yahoo and MSN closing in on Google. Ask Jeeves is also a clear success and has achieve clear gains in the space.
Ad clicking behavior is directly related to customer satisfaction. Interesting indication from the study. They do not take volume driven statistics. Ask Jeeves has resulted in the best click through rates. I am wondering if this has to do with the 10 sponsored ads they had in the natural results, which has since been tweaked.

Approx 1 in 5 users express frustration with search results relevance; product search yields fewer problems than other types of search. Some other findings from the study, say that 95% of participants use Google “sometimes or “often”. 64% use Google as their “primary search engines:. Other findings are that 3 in 4 have a primary search engines. 1 in 2 use another search engine if they cannot find what they are looking for. 1 in 3 use a search engine toolbar on their browser.

On the behavior side 3 in 4 participants began their search through a search engine or Web portal (source: clickstreams). 48% of participants used Google at some time during the task; 29% used Yahoo and 8% used MSN. 22% of people searched for a specific website they had in mind. They were also able to see how much time was spent on each website. You have the search engines, but you also have eBay and Amazon. She shows that eBay kinda sucks people in. Customer experience management helps you understand the “WHY” behind customer behavior. Sites that drive clicking behavior, may not drive a satisfying customer experience. People want relevant search results – marketers can be a partner in that goal.

Next up was Gord Hutchkiss presents some new findings about possible influences that can help us understand searcher behavior. Was hoping to see how different types of people search. They went through thousands results and manually coded them. The rank and page position were the only things that matter to users. They considered t values greater than 2. Of all the click throughs they monitored 51% clicked on the number 1 listing. There was a discrepancy between how searchers behaved as opposed to what they told us.

They created a theory, and found that a users confidence level gradually went down if they found it harder to find something they were looking for. What’s the best way to find out what they are seeing. Eye-tracking. It gives them a map of how someones eyes move across the page. Very interesting, he put up a page that showed the eyes move. These are high level finding. What was discovered was the behavior indicated that the activity on the search page show up at the top of the page. What they found that the majority of the activity happens right above the fold. “Searches golden triangle” meaning the location on the page where most people see and look at. It’s the Park Place and Broadwalk of the search page. The study also showed that the #1 paid listing also gets a high percentage of activity. If you move down beyond the page you are determined and educated about finding something down there. Back to the triangle. If the listing catches the attention to the user they will read the first listing. If not, then they scan the right side where the paid listings are. This pattern will be repeated down the page. About 50% of people are going to scan down below the fold, and the process starts over. So this scan pattern, what does it mean when building listings in the vertical space.

You need to put something that will pop and catch attention. If you do so you will get a better chance of a click through. For visibility, there is a drop down after listing number 3. After listing 8 there is a huge drop drown again in scanning behavior. Seems to level off 20-30% down at the bottom (9th and 10th) positions. 28% of people click through on the #1 paid listing. It drops off below the 3rd paid listings. If they can see the ads, why does it drop. When people where asked about how they click, they said they would click on the first thing that interested them. Asks how many people have seen rankings slip down on less popular terms. He mentions something about using click popularity as a part of how they rank. They capture how they interacted on the site. If you are above the fold you have a good chance of getting someone to click. If they are in the search triangle then they will click on the first listing. Incredible presentation!

Next up was Cam Balzer, and is discussing search before purchase. He goes into some company information. There goal was to look at the behavior up to the purchase and several areas they wanted to dig deeper. What kinds of search activity precedes the converting search/click? Search ROI usually considers only the last click before purchase. They identified 30 ecommerce website that had enough traffic to give them some reliable data. The looked at buyers and how they behaved. The findings of their study, one of the most powerful was roughly half of all buyers made a relevant search before their online purchase. They also found that marketers have a way to reach users at each step of the buying process. Travel for example had a high volume of people that did 10+ searched to find what they were looking for. Another finding was that majority of buyers searches and clicks are on generic terms. Brands do well in search, and they wanted to see how brands performed with other searches. There is a lot of people searching on generic terms to find what they were looking for. The other finding was that 30% of searchers only used a brand search. It was curious that so few users only used a branded search. Another findings, if someone was searching for a winter jacket or something in the spring, they may spend a long time in order to complete the process, sometimes up to 4-6 months. Another finding related to how the investment put into paying for generic terms also resulted in positive return for the brand name.

Room is really packed, and I am passing out yo-yo’s. Barry is also attending this session and will be covering it. So we will probably have to compare notes at the end.

First up was Jason Lamberti from comScore Networks. He runs the search marketing group of his firm. He is going to cover various segments of the market. How does comScore get their data?. They use passive tracking of actual consumer search activity. There are 1.5 million member panel of online consumers who have agreed to be continuously and passively observed. There are all kinds of data sources, and they cover the marketing thought a variety of angles. He goes into the search consumer development by country. The intensity and penetration in the U.S. lags major behind EU markets. Google dominates worldwide. You need to go through the Google network in order to market to those in countries besides the US. Search is a key marketing method to reach the working user. Overall search growth of 22.4% is driven by 25.3% increase in work audience. U.S. search and share trends have fluctuated in several areas. Recently there have been a flat amount of growth in certain areas. Reason, each search engine comes out with the same thing (desktop search, etc..) Branding is going to take a critical role in which search engine they use. He gives the example of William Jung and Ask Jeeves. Obviously we all saw this commercial. He goes on to say that search engines each have its strengths.

Local search trends, there is a conservative view of local web search suggests huge opportunities exist for marketers. Why are people searching locally? For the vast majority of the time, its searching in the area that they live, nearly 60% of local searches are for this reason. He mentions that searchers want a convenient and integrated experience. There are some reason why you might want to use a toolbar. Trial is strong – 58% of searchers have installed a toolbar. 12% of these users have uninstalled the toolbar. There is also a group that don’t even use the toolbar at all. Heavy users dominate search. There are 20% of users contribute 68% of the volume of search daily. There is the 20/30/50 rule. That 20% of searchers (meaning actual people) take up 68 percent of searches. 30% take up 24% of searches, and 50% of searchers only take up 8% of the searches. Meaning more sophisticated users do more searching and more frequently.

He next asks what users think is more important for a search engine to consider? Privacy ranks the highest as most important. When asked what would make them switch search engines? A large amount said they would switch if the relevancy is better. Jason mentions that with no barrier to switching, all search engines are vulnerable to something better or more convenient. Switching is very common and easy to do on the internet. Some 52% of Google searches are conducted on other places besides the Google site. It still contains a wide open market, and something can change.

He repeats that 85% of online purchase conversion occurs in subsequent user sessions. Consumers have a long buyer cycle, with a great deal of conversion occurring after week 4. He says this presentation is not online as the data is very valuable. I was impressed with the data and the level of coverage. If you are reading this, consider yourself privileged.

Next up was Bill Tracer from Hitwise. He wants to talk and give an overview of search landscape. On to the data, he put up a graph of the market share of the search engines against all internet sites. He talks about stats that pertain to search volume. Search volume indicates that Google is currently driving 55.5% of all U.S. search traffic. Bill next presents some click stream data, particularly the upstream traffic. The data shows that there is a clear difference between Google and Yahoo/MSN Search. Both Yahoo and MSN search benefit from portal parents. Could origination of visits explain difference in search yield (i.e. convenience search v. search mission). He mentions something called the “Mom Factor” He gives the example of his mom, and how she will go to MSN and type in www.google.com in the search bar. He then tells her she can do this in the url bar, and save the time. He asks why she did this, and she answers the internet is a big scary place. I guess you have to be here to get the joke.

He mentions psychographics of local search. Psychographic analysis of visitors to local search reveals differences between Google Local and Yahoo local search. Google Local: a slight skew to smaller second-tier cities. He then goes on to mention desktop search versus main search engine reveals a skew towards mature users. Yahoo Desktop search demonstrates the strongest skew in segments M1 and M3 (being the level of age and maturity). He mentions that older (50+) use desktop search more often. Reason: Older people loose things more often.

Next up was the Kenneth Cassar from Nielsen/ Net Ratings. He starts off by saying that innovation is not an option. He wants to imply that innovation is imperative. Covered in this session there will be the state of the competitive market in the search space. Where is tomorrow’s growth in search supply going to come from. Google continues to enjoy dominance in the search marketing share. Google takes up 47% of the market. So what about searchers? Google covers 28.7 million searches, Yahoo 13.7 million, and MSN 12.2 million searches. He then overlaps the charts and shows that there are a lot of overlapping between the various engines. One person might both use Google and Yahoo. I completely agree with this assessment. Why not use more than one? Example is that Google and Yahoo share 18.3 million searches. In the total universe of daily searches is 102 million between the three main players.
So where will tomorrows growth in search supply come from? I am enjoying Kenneth’s presentation, very well organized and clear. He describes how they looked back two years. Even though the markets has grown 100% each year, the amount of pages being added hasn’t been as much. These are interesting statistics, and very good for search marketers to hear. The online audience has been entirely responsible for the new growth year to year. A look back in history. There has also been historical threats of supply storage, innovation will create new supply. There are various segments for incremental growth. They are: advertising, new kinds of advertisers, and local search. New advertisers that are brought in the search fold. There are a several significant groups of advertisers have not yet embraced search advertising.
Local he says is one of the single best opportunities. Innovation is clear, Yahoo has developed many new innovations on this front. A9.com is an example. He says that local search opportunity is a nascent one.

They moved us all from a smaller room to a larger room and it is still a bit small. So they are moving walls around to make it even larger, movable walls - nice. Danny reused his normal joke about committing to the session and "we will commit to you" and people laughed (I guess we have newbies here).

Leading off is Dr. Bonny Brown from Keynote Systems (from Vividence), who will talk from the customers perspective. Keynote's mission is to improve e-businesses worldwide by focusing on the technical aspects and customer experience management space. She explains that there is often very little insight when tracking users as to where people get lost during the clickstream. To get the "complete customer behavior" you need more detail. Customers have expectations, and you need to understand and measure them. Then you need to understand the "whys" actions of behavior. Keynote measures industry metrics to get a better picture for benchmarks. They invite panelists, they logon, they ask you to search the Web with a toolbar (which does all that fun tracking). The results... Google is number one from a customer's experience ranking. Yahoo is number two and MSN is number three BUT Yahoo and MSN are both closing in on Google. She says, Ask Jeeves it a clear success by showing substantial gains. Ad clicking behavior seems to be INVERSELY related to the above numbers (search experience). Just keep in mind that Ask Jeeves gives you very little choice but to click on the sponsored ads (rumors are that they are going to limit that). You find a lot more frustration with searchers on complex searches. 95% use Google sometimes or often, 64% use it as their primary engine. 1 in 3 are using a toolbar. 17% use different search engines for different types of searches. 92% said they used the engines to find products. Relevance is #1 factor in search loyalty, including sponsored results. On the behavior side, they are able to see what people actually do. 3 of 4 of the people who they sat in front of a computer and asked them to find information used a search engine (wow, 25% didn't use an engine). 48% Google, 29% Yahoo!. They also measured the time they spent on the sites. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Amazon, eBay in that order are the time spent on those sites but eBay has a lot more pageviews then Google.

Gord Hotchkis from Enquiro was going to share some eye tracking studies with the help of Did-It (Kevin Lee). He explained the possible influencers include type of user, presence of brand, trusted URLs, demographics and trusted sources of information. And they expected to see a strong correlation between these sources. But what they saw was that the most important influencer was ranking. Of all the click throughs on organic listings, 24% on number 1, 19.5% number two and 12.8% on the number three listings. They came up with a theory named, the search confidence theory, which means, you trust the engine you use to give you relevant results. As you hit that back button, throughout a session, you lose your confidence level. So as you hit that back button and go to new results, you expect them to care more about the influencers listed above as opposed to just ranking. So to prove this theory, they did some eye tracking studies. They ran 50 people through in their labs, they aggregated this information at this time. He showed a slide of red, orange, blue, black, etc. The bulk of the red orange is at the top left, right where the top three results are. The majority of the eye activity is at the top, they called it "Search's Golden Triangle" which appears to include the sponsored listings and the "hidden tabs". The number one listing gets a high level of activity. The eye goes first to the top left point, then it moves to the right, to read that one listing. Then they scroll in a vertical line down on the left side, if any of those results catch someone's attention they move right again. If they don't find anything, 60% will scroll down and continue the pattern - the other 40% will look at the sponsored listings on the right. This study was only performed on Google. So you need to put something at the beginning at the title, that will catch their eyes (@#%$$). In the "golden triangle" visibility is huge up to ranking 3, then you drop off to about 60% in 4th position, and then 6, 7 and 8 go to 50% and then at 8, 9 10 drop big time 20%. Now clickthroughs, number one position 28% CTR, and then on #2 12%, and #3 11% or so, and then it drops to 6% for the remainder. So why aren't everyone clicking on the top three (numbers two and three have a much worse CTR then #1)? They click away. Sponsored results differ that the first two at the top are high visibility, and on the right side, it is very low visibility. He then summarized and told us what he wants to do more with these studies.

Last up, Cam Balzer from Perfomics (DoubleClick just bought them in July 04). They looked at search activity that lead up to the purchase or transaction. Most search tracking just looks at the last click before the purchase and most people look at the same session value (latency isnt being used). The methodology was to use ComScore's panel, identified 30 e-commerce sites in four verticals, and they identified all the buyers on the panel for a 30 day period and finally they weeded out all the random searches done. They basically weeded out a ton of irrelevant searches. They found that there are a lot of people using search before they buy. In all four verticals about 50% use search before they buy. Marketers have several opportunities to reach buyers, around 6 - 12 searches per user (interesting). They also looked at how brand keywords perform versus generic terms. Majority of search activity is around generic keywords all through the buying process (triangle searching?) Most buyers never search on a merchant brands, less then 30% on the computer vertical searched on a brand. Branded search activity peaks immediately prior to purchase. But on the computer vertical the brand search peak is much lower right before the purchase as compared to the other verticals. Almost 55% in travel space, did their last search almost two weeks before they purchased something (two weeks!). People who buy off a brand term normally start off with a generic search, but those who buy off a generic search don't normally search brand in the process. He says search is getting more competitive, to capitalize on this opportunity, you need to fully understand the value of search (not just a two week window).

This room is packed, people standing out the doors, siting on the floor and hanging from the ceilling. Three firms are up on the panel who collect data all across the Web on search related topics.

First up was James Lamberti from Comscore Networks and he runs the search group there. They get their data from 1.5 million consumers, who have agreed to be continously and passively observed. They collect all search activity, actual purchase, and other transactions. They capture everything. The data sources are many and he didn't go through them all. Search development by country, the US is lagging behind in terms of searches per searcher available. Meaning, there are more internet users in the US, but as a percentage of those users, less are using search then other countries. Google dominates around the world, but in the US, Google does not totally dominate. 22.4% search growth from Jan 04 - 05, but Work consumer group has frown 25%. Google and Yahoo have gain share at the expense of AOL, within the US. But since May 04 or so, everything has pretty much remain constant in the search area. He then broke down the share of market by segment, School: Google 42%, Yahoo 32%. Work; Google 37%, Yahoo 30% and MSN 19%. Local search trends show a slow growth from 8.3% to 10%, meaning searchers using Google and adding in state or local parameters in the query. He points out that most of it is happening at many search engines and not at yellow pages, etc. Growth in toolbar searches have grown 136% in the US since Jan 04. He said 17 - 18% of searches are coming from toolbars, WOW. 58% of searchers have not installed the toolbars and 12% have uninstalled the toolbar. In search there is a 20 - 68 rule, 20% of the users contribute 68% of volume. Heavy searchers are less likely to click on the sponsored links (27%). He noted that there is "impression value" in having your result come up in the sponsored links. 22% of the people who do not search represent 4% of the buyers online (hmmm). Satisfaction is high from most search engines. Most important search attributes for search engines at this time is privacy (Google toolbar). When you ask them, what will make you switch, the top answer is "relevancy". 49% of the searches powered by Google is happening outside of Google, which is interesting. He notes that this is still a wide open market. A vast majority of converts, are done offline, meaning lots of people doing research online will buy offline. So its very important to be able to somehow track offline conversions (a session on that later).

Bill Tancer from Hitwise, and he introduced himself as "I Love Data". He called himself a huge geek, he said finally numbers and data have become cool. They monitor the largest worldwide sample of internet users. They categorize them into 160 cats. Market share of visits to all internet sites on the Web, Google 3.1% Yahoo 1.7% and MSN 1.5% - Google has grown the most. Search volume indicates that Google is currently driving 55.5% of all US Internet searches, Yahoo 30.8% and MSN 6.64%. He gathered some clickstream data, its interesting to see that most of the search traffic is coming from the parent (yahoo.com, msn.com) but Google's upstream is coming from a wide share %, which differs from the rest. The top search from Yahoo and MSN are more navigational (www.site.com) and Google is not like that (more internet savvy). The demographics between the engines are very close, Google has a slightly higher male pop and higher income pop. He is popping up some really cool and informative slides, wish I can type faster. Google skews slightly to smaller cities compared to the other engines. Google Desktop vs. Yahoo Desktop, there is a strong skew towards the mature users, the 55+ group are more likely to use Desktop search. Verticalization of Search, will the shopping engines, etc. cannibalize the main search business. Health and medical search verticles have gone up 10% and 45% come from the main engines. 10.23% of the searches from Google go to shopping and classified sites of that eBay is the top, then amazon, etc. But when looking at other engines, it was extremely similar in the percentages. The theory is that over time, people will start have brand identity with these vertical engines and take away some traffic from main engines.

Ken Cassar from Nielsen//NetRatings was the last one up. Google's market share is at 47%, Yahoo at 21%, MSN 13% and AOL at 5%. They define a search as someone entering in a query and pressing the enter key. Google also has the largest audience of exclusive searchers; 29.7m. Yahoo has 13.7m and MSN has 12.2m and then he overlapped them (which is nice, there is an ton of cross usage of the engines). The search boom has been more driven by advertisers than consumers. Demand is not the main reason for growth, it is the supply pushing it up. This all highlights the need for innovation, in his opinion. There has been many people who talk about running out of supply. He feels its more about building more cost to switching, that should be interesting to see. MSN is advertising, Yahoo! was doing ads on local offerings and Ask is doing some ads. He said several significant groups of advertisers have not yet embraced search advertising, including; high consideration brand advertisers and low consideration direct marketers (oh so true). Is there a brand impact on people seeing paid listings? They did some tests and they saw a statistically signification different with paid listings. He won't go as far to say that brand building is better done with paid listings then through TV spots (would you?). He believes local is the single biggest opportunity there, and he points out Yahoo!. He does a query and shows some nice search results from Yahoo. A9 is an other engine focused on this he says, "Click to Call Business" (pay per call?). Local searches 3% versus all other searches 97%. They define local by using a local property, unlike Bill's or James figures which use the query term to determine local searches.

Niki Scevak from Jupiter Research opened up the Search Forecast and Outlook: Profiting from Growth Through 2009. I have attended this session about 2 times before, as I believe it provides some of the best information on the first day of the conference. He mentions that by 2009 paid search growth remains strong but beginning to slow eventually. Search will reach 5.5 billion dollar industry by 2009.

He next goes into the elements of paid search, with the first being pricing. What is seen is the increasing cost per clicking will be driving spend up and ROI down. The willingness and confidence of marketers to spend is the return on investment that paid search can return. He mentions that paid search cost will eventually stabilize. As retailers, travel merchants, and online merchants improve conversions rates some of that price is passed down as a higher CPC price. The primary aim is transactional, and if you peel away the effect, the primary goal is to produce successful sales.

The other driver of search dollars is the growing segment of households adopting broadband access. Search is the second most ambiguous activity next to email. As broadband increases from 27 million households to 46 million households will mean that users are spending more time online. This is a conservative outlook, and mentions that the forecasts for last year were short of what was real. In terms of the impact of broadband, the convenience is one of the things that will provide benefit to the people using it. Having access more frequently will allow more people to easily go online.

Relevance is improving and because so will help users make better decisions. Niki next goes into Local Search. He sees that in 2004 local search was a 408 million market, and by 2009 it should cap or exceed 879 million. This market is a long standing challenge that many companies have invested heavily to realize the full impact of this market. He says this market is in its very early stages, and there are barriers to adoption by users. One of the things they are very bullish on, is vertical search. There are many broad based online properties such as a lot of major online magazines and news sites. Search engines will launch around these categories in order to bring a broader selections of options for users. He mentions an executive survey they do yearly to investigate the amount of search spending tied to online transactions. The primary goal of the search spending is online transactions, and the dollars spent is tied directly back to instant online sales. Where there are transactions are going on, paid search marketing will be eventually tied to its success. They conducted a study that indicated that select categories (travel, media, entertainment, financial) are taking 80% of search spending seen today. Examples of these companies include Bizrate, Monster.com, and many other companies under these categories.

So what will the future hold for these categories? He says that new search engines will launch and that existing players will restructure their pricing model based on CPC and lead based acquisitions. There are a number of players that are gaining traction in the vertical marketing. 1/3 to 1/5 of users of vertical search engines come from broad based search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The role of vertical search is to further allow better searching for the user and make the transactions easier in the change. Often the users find better information and the retailers get better quality leads. We may see more companies spending more money on vertical search engines. Vertical search will not replace Google or Yahoo or one of the broad based search engines. Its an added layer to the search experience. If you go to Yahoo and type in “digital camera” you might end up on Amazon or Shopping.com and then back to Amazon to make your purchase. The process is not complete yet.

Niki next goes in a forecast of search that will profoundly impact display advertising. The advertising placement is expanding and there is a critical mass of advertising available. They have a large amount of reach, but very few frequency in terms of behavioral marketing. Its hard to measure the exact behavior. Will they use Google or Yahoo. The decision to search for a product or service can last for several months instead of just a short amount of time. He then ends and opens up for questions.

Q: How much are search engines are getting into display advertising? Where is mobile search headed?
A: Once the inventory of search sites becomes mature, where people can plug into a network. Example is Friendster, where they have a huge inventory but little behavior tracking. They are willing to share their revenue to reach a better display. If someone searches for a car, car ads may appear on the Friendster network next time they log in. Mobile search is increasing, Yellowpages is one example as it appears he is implying this is the one way people might use it. He also mentions that mobile search is not that convenient yet.

Q: What the limiting factors facing search?
A: The maturity of the online population is an issue. The improvement per months will be based on new broadband users, and one that is tenured. He says that in coming years, cost will be stabilizing, not that they will not increase, but it will be slower. As long as conversions improve, so will cost of advertising, as their many industry where there are still undiscovered keywords and inventory. This has also contributed to the large amount of growth, and it may become more flat as the inventory plays out over the next few years.

He mentions an interesting fact from the yearly survey they do, is that surveyed individuals have said that print based yellowpages (big yellow book) is more effective and easier to use than online listings or yellowpages.

Q: Where are the assumptions behind the growth through 2009 coming from?
A: Around 23% of queries have a commercial intent. This has been trending slightly upward. There are significant efforts by search engines to identify their organic results. The relevance between paid and organic should not change dramatically. He says that organic results offer more opportunity to describe more information about the site. This information helps drive more people to use organic listing, whereas paid search is limited to a certain amount of words in the copy.

Q: If Google examines the people that use paid search and only lets in the most relevant, will this improve conversions?
A: Niki says that you can not restrict the view just to a US market. Within the last 18 months, companies have tripled their budgets for paid search as they become more sophisticated.

Q: Someone in the audience mentions that paid inclusion is included in the forecast and asks why this is?
A: Yahoo is one of the players still using paid inclusion. This is evolving into some kind of transaction form. I don’t know what he means here. It’s a niche opportunity. He says that paid inclusion is certain misunderstood. Where paid ranking vs. the guarantee that your site will be spidered daily. People may be willing to paid a certain amount of money for this certainty that their new products will be spidered.

Q: Question on budgets
A: People should not look at how much should we spend? The expectation level is unreal. When you have the contextual pricing tied to search advertising. This is confusing for advertisers. I do agree!

Q: Contextual advertising trends, where are they headed?
A: Direct sales forces are becoming better. Contextual advertising networks are constrained by the success of the direct sales force. This is on one side. There are remnant inventories, based on a yield management surveys, that advertisers are looking at. It’s hard to say that basing the ads on what is on the page of the website doesn’t tell much about conversions or trends. I am sure he is directly talking about the contextual properties that are under Google’s and other search engines control (eg. Adsense, Content Match, etc..).

Yahoo turns 10 on March 2nd! Celebrating 10 years of an amazing success that has taken the internet community by storm. I don't know what 10 years in search engine years translate to people years, but I expect their might be a few grey hairs here and there. :) Just thought I would quickly mention this as I just received an email from Yahoo (as did probably many people) that they are planning a surprise on their homepage on March 2nd. They quote saying "On our birthday, we're offering you more than great content. Visit Yahoo's homepage for a special treat." Yahoo is also throwing a shindig of sorts here at the SES conference here in New York. Yahoo does know how to throw a party, so I expect it to be a lot of fun.

Check out the birthday card Yahoo has created for their anniversary.

Ben and I thought it would be fun to hand out these funky yo-yos that light up when you use them. The slogan of the Search Engine Roundtable, "The Pulse of the Search Engine Marketing Community", is imprinted on the yo-yos. Since the SEO world is filled with such ups and downs, we thought it would be clever to give out yo-yos. Then we added the glowing aspect to the yo-yo to make it "pulse" a bit.

I admit, its not as cool as having William Hung at a party, but we are not on the same level as Jeeves.

So if you see Ben or myself at the conference, please ask for one or two. After the conference, I will probably mail out a bunch to some dedicated readers. Any left over, might get some at the Toronto SES show.

Well, the SES NYC show is coming to my home town Monday, and Ben and I will be providing live coverage. Ben and I will try to attend different sessions, this way we can provide the widest coverage possible. Also, there will be a few guest authors attending the conference, who I will bug to pitch in as they can. Our goal, to provide the most detailed and unbiased coverage of this SES show.

Here are the sessions currently on my list to see:
Monday: Search Forecast and Outlook: Profiting from Growth through 2009; The Search Landscape; Searcher Behavior and Search Algorithm Research & Developments.

Tuesday: Jerry Yang Keynote; What Is Spam?; Indexing Summit; News & Webfeed Search; and maybe Branding Tactics For Search (I probably will have to leave early this day).

Wednesday: Search Convergence; Local Search Marketing Tactics; Brand Summit: Life After Google-Geico; 3:45p - 5:15p Undecided; and Evening Forum With Danny Sullivan (anything you want me to ask?).

Thursday: What Is Content?; Integrating Search Into Other Marketing; Final session undecided.

Any requests, feel free to make them. We will see what we can do. Thanks for reading everyday!

Danny Sullivan's round up article on Googles's Autolink experiment is fantastic and a must read for anyone who owns a web site and cares about the experience of their visitors.

In Google Toolbar's AutoLink & The Need For Opt-Out he writes,

"Threadwatch describes a JavaScript blocking solution cooked up by Search Guild. Download the solution (instructions are provided), insert it into your web pages. The same Threadwatch thread is also tracking any new solutions that come up -- some new server-side ones have just been posted.

Meanwhile, an anti-anti-AutoLink option appears to also be out there for users who want to override publishers trying to prevent AutoLink. I say appears because it seems like a clunky workaround that I can't really understand -- and looking at the comments posted, some others don't get it as well.

I mention it mainly because it highlights how quickly things have become absurd. You have third-parties working to prevent AutoLink and potentially others working to prevent preventing AutoLink. It's a mess."

This "mess" is born out of the fact that Google is experimenting on our web sites, and in some cases, possibly doing harm. For every parent who has a kid who has a web site on the Internet, the fact that a Google Autolink can now present a map to your house, if that web site has your address in the content, is the stuff nightmares are made of.

From the usability standpoint, removing the right to control the experience of your web site visitor is cause for concern. If someone didn't hyperlink a book, there may be a reason for that. Google doesn't ask you. The Autolink will take your visitor to Amazon anyway. Away from your web site.

I have much to say about this in Danny Sullivan's Review of Google Toolbar's AutoLink

Won't bore you with it all here :)

Monday night, Ask Jeeves is hosting an invite only party in NYC. At this party, I am told, William Hung will be making a special appearance. There are now other rumors spreading that William Hung and Jeeves have a thing going on.

I just had to post about this funny looking forum avatar over at Cre8asite Forums, member's screen name is ninjacat.

I noticed this while reading this nice thread named Froogle experience?.

Just got notice that SEMPO elected a new board today.

The thirteen Board of Directors that will serve a one-year term, starting in mid-March, are (in alphabetical order):

Ron Belanger, Carat Interactive
Chris Churchill, Fathom Online
Barbara Coll, Webmama.com
Koichiro Fukasawa, Wasabi Communications
Gordon Hotchkiss, Enquiro
Kevin Lee, Did-it.com
Mauro Lupi, Ad Maiora SpA
Jeffrey Pruitt, iCrossing
John Sanchez, Zunch Communications
Jessie Stricchiola, Alchemist Media
Julienne Thompson, Advertising.com
Dana Todd, SiteLab
David Williams, 360i

See you at SES NYC new SEMPO board.

I am sure you have seen this, where you come from a Google search and land on a page and you notice the the keywords you searched on are highlighted within the context of that page you land on. If you haven't try this search phrase, click on this search phrase then click on the first result, it should take you to DigitalPoint's forum and highlight the words.

Now what if you used a variation of this and instead of just highlighting the keywords, you insert them into the headline of the page. Why would I want to do that? Well, there have been tests done that show when you have the keywords in the landing page, it will ultimately lead to a high conversion rate. If think deeper about this and maybe the dynamic insertion of keywords into the page will lower this conversion rate in the long term. Anyway, it can be done.

There are two issues that come to mind:

(1) What if the search query is not in proper grammatical sense? Your page will look weird. Misspellings, offensive words and so on.

(2) The second issue is that the page is, in a sense, cloaked. Because the search engines can not retrieve the same page, exactly with the same context, as the user.

These issues are now being discussed in a Search Engine Watch thread.

Moderator, AussieWebmaster, reports that Google is to change the Google AdWords user interface tomorrow. He says that "Google has reported that its Adwords' interface will be unavailable on Friday February 25, 2005 from 9 pm - 12 am pst." Typically, these things happen before SES conferences. Stay tuned for more information. Forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The resident PhD, Orion, over at the Search Engine Watch Forums, provides an insight into search engine optimization that many SEOs do not think about. In his latest thread named What is Keyword Competitiveness?, Orion says that two popular keyword analysis techniques used by SEOs are "based on speculations" and is an "exercise in futility."

The two methods he dislikes include:
(1) Combining Google and Overture keyword volumes and
(2) Building a composite metric from keyword tools that have data from "dissimilar meta engines". Well most of the tools we have use "dissimilar meta engines".

I'll quote his explanation and then you can battle it out at the thread.

Combining two different or more metrics, some representing document counts and others representing query volume from dissimilar databases (Google with Overture or several meta engines), seem to be an exercise in futility: e.g., two dissimilar analytics from two different stores are combined and taken for a fair metric. Surprisingly, many SEOs/SEMs use and defend this approach, even when the arguments are based on formulas made out of thin air. Purely and simply: based on speculations.

Announced just yesterday, Brett Tabke, owner of WebmasterWorld, a forum that gets lots of coverage over here, will be holding its next conference in New Orleans on that dates of June 21-24. I made a new category for this conference, I think I will be able to attend like the WebmasterWorld Las Vegas 2004 Conference and provide detailed coverage.

Nick Wilson said there are rumors that the Vegas conference lost money. Others believe that it is just rumors and nothing more. Who cares? The WebmasterWorld conference is a great conference. If they lost money last time, then they will learn from it and move on. All businesses lose money on one thing or an other. Learn and move on.

The official forum thread can be found at WebmasterWorld, hope to see you there.

Google cleaned up and simplified the AdSense payment console screen. Jenstar has a detailed blog entry on this topic. She also started a thread at WebmasterWorld, that has already grown to four pages.

Jenstar notes that "The thing that caught my eye the most is the "Payment Type: Check" when you click the payment details. Might just be a sign of future payment options to come." It makes sense for Google to try electronic payments, should save them some money.

The thread at WebmasterWorld has some funny but valid comments. One such comment was:

Made me smile at the mix of languages on mine

Payment Type: Check
Cheque Date: 25-Jan-2005

The popular DigitalPoint Ad Network has reached a new level of popularity. People are actually advertising it on Google's AdWord network for certain keyword phrases. The reason they advertise it, is because they get "referral credit" for everyone they refer. So the cost per click pays based on the rankings it produces organically for the user who is paying for the ad.

I believe the keyword this individual was bidding on was good cpm banner network, the ad does not come up anymore. For a screen capture see here and for the forum thread visit DigitalPoint Forums.

I have had the privilege to be in communication with Jim Lanzone at Ask Jeeves on a fairly regular basis. In some of our email exchanges, he discussed how Teoma is Ask Jeeves. I couldn't find the right word for it, so I used "cannibalize". Cannibalize is a harsh word, but the point is, Ask Jeeves is what people know. You and I might know Teoma, and respect it highly but its time for Ask and Teoma to "establish themselves as a single entity." Apostolos one of the founders of Teoma is the "#1 guy driving the engine", Jim told me. Jim continues by saying, without Ask Jeeves, Teoma would not be where it is today, so in a sense "Teoma is really just a theory" - Ask Jeeves is the engine.

For us, as individuals tied so closely to the technology and search, Teoma is something inspirational to us. Subject specific popularity, looking at the Web as communities, hubs, and authorities - and bring back results in milliseconds - Apostolos and Tao are geniuses. In Mike's interview, in an earlier entry I wrote today, Jim said to Mike; "It is all Ask Jeeves now. As Apostolos said earlier, it was only seven people and it's now into triple digits."

This is not a major issue for Ask to deal with outside of the SEM community. But Ask Jeeves does not want to hurt any feelings within this industry. Apostolos said "So there is indeed an appreciation of the simple fact that you were able to help us." He commends our industry for helping the search engines, and Ask Jeeves, work harder to get to where search should be. He said they are currently at stage three of ten and he is very excited to be part of Ask Jeeves and the future of search. Even though that might mean that Teoma is just a theory, a theory that will remain with Ask Jeeves, Apostolos and the SEM community for a really long time.

Again, I started a thread on this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

We all had our suspicions that Google no longer used PageRank. Well, most of us thought Google just doesn't use it to the level they did a year or two ago. Mike Grehan says Google does not use PageRank period. He kind of implied that Apostolos said Google does not use PageRank at all. In the interview, Mike quoted Apostolos as saying, "Have they implemented PageRank? The answer is no." He goes on to explain that "The importance [of PageRank] has diminished because PageRank is just one piece of the ranking algorithm over there. The ranking algorithm is so much more complex now. And PageRank is just used when they want to break ties."

I started a thread on this specific topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This new interview by Mike Grehan named Mike Grehan in conversation with... Apostolos Gerasoulis and Jim Lanzone is a must read. One little tidbit in there, is that Apostolos says Google no longer uses PageRank.

I am still reading the interview, so more comments later.

When reading other blogs or sites that have links to specific forum posts, you often see that the person links not directly to the post that they are quoting, but rather the thread or the page the post is on. For those that do this, I'll show you how I link to individual posts within the context of a whole thread.

For example; Danny Sullivan had an excellent post today, in response to a members post on the second page of the thread named The Little Engine That Could - Part II.

The code looks like:
For example; Danny Sullivan had an excellent <a href="http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=35782#post35782" target="_blank">post</a> today, in response to a members <a href="http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=35599#post35599" target="_blank">post</a> on the <a href="http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4285&page=2&pp=20" target="-blank">second page</a> of the thread named <a href="http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4285">The Little Engine That Could - Part II</a>.

Getting the thread URL; i.e. http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4285 is easy, just click on the thread name from the forum. Getting the page specific URL is easy as well, just click on the page number while in the thread or forum.

But getting the link to the specific post, within the context of the thread (so the single post isn't only shown), can be done by clicking the view source button. Then do a find command in the source code on the post date, in the case above, with Danny's post I looked for "Today, 07:56 AM" within the source and then it shows "post35782". The next step is to click on the "find new post" button and then replace where it says "p=XXXXXX#postXXXXXX" with the appropriate post number.

In firefox, you can view "selection source" which makes it a bit quicker.

Google announced today at the Google Blog new shortcut to find movies within the Google index. All you need to do is prefix the movie name with "movie:" and it will bring back results and reviews. Google gives one example of a popular phrase used in the Matrix; so you can do a search on movie: red pill blue pill and it will bring back results for the matrix.

Also, if you want to check whats playing local, just search on movie: Suffern, NY, replace Suffern, NY with your city and state.

Gary has a nice write up on this at the SEW Blog and there is a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

According to a thread at WebmasterWorld, GoogleBot is really crawling sites to the max, over the past few days. Some are reporting, "Never saw a crawl like that..." and others "unprecedented".

I got to run to a meeting, so I can not check my logs for bot activity right now.

There is a new meta tag that came out on February 19th named NAC (Natural Area Code), according to Chris Sherman. The Natural Area Coding System is "a new system to standardize and integrate geodetic datums, geographic coordinates, geographic area codes, map grids, addresses and postal codes in the world."

The tag looks something like <meta name="NAC" content="6TFMX N1HC8">

BakedJake at a thread at WebmasterWorld said "The engines can solve the problem already (whether or not they are applying the solution is a different story)." He adds, "and I don't see a good use for the application other than to sort into country indexes on a global scale."

Something new for your folks.

There are reports over at WebmasterWorld that MSN Search is starting to deploy geo-targeting. In other words, if you are searching in the UK, you are more likely to get search results that are tailored to UK visitors. Possibly sites hosted in the UK, the co.uk extension and other criteria to determine which sites are more for the UK searcher then the US searcher.

Many search engines already do this.

I used to use HotBot all the time to quickly check the difference in search results between many search engines. Now it looks like HotBot gives the searcher on two engines to choose from, Google and Ask Jeeves. I think back a year or more ago, it allowed you to search with AltaVista, Inktomi, Google, Ask, AllTheWeb and others. I guess since there are only now four main players, two being new to the game (Yahoo! and MSN), there was a need to drop some. But specifically, according to a thread over at WebmasterWorld, HotBot has dropped Yahoo! as an option.

Recent news to spread across the blog-wire is that Picsearch announces collaboration with MSN. Picsearch and its "Psbot" crawls the Web to find images to include in its index. Picsearch powers several engines including Ask Jeeves and Lycos Europe, so MSN is a major contract for them. I actually had someone meet with me that wanted me to build an engine that competed with Picsearch, funny.

A thread is currently at Search Engine Watch Forums and Gary Price blogged on it at the Search Engine Watch Blog.

A new trade group has been formed, it is named the Web Analytics Association. I asked Ammon Johns if he had any direct influence with this trade group and he said no, but I find his recent campaign with the issues with referral tracking to be awfully close to the time this organization was set up.

If your interested in joining, it costs just $129 for one year, more information at http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/cms/?54.

A ClickZ article at http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3484526. Also make sure to check out the Committee Members and Corporate Members; including Coremetrics, IBM, NedStat, Omniture, WebSideStory, WebTrends, Visual Sciences, and others like ClickTracks.

Looks promising... Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

It is just assumed that blogs have a special deep and intimate connection with the search engines, allowing them to rank above other sites with ease. That is not the case, blogs do not get special treatment because they are blogs.

A thread at Cre8asite Forums named How are blogs identified?. In that thread Ammon Johns and Barry Welford explain that it is because a blog is designed in a very search engine friendly manner, basically out of the box. You and I can build something just as search friendly as a blog, but these blogs are like that, out of the box. They have the keywords in the right places in the source code, they have frequent and fresh content through comments and frequent updates, and they get links really easily through trackbacks.

Also, as Barry W. said, they have much potential in search with the out of the box RSS functionality. I have been saying for a while, that RSS is going to be a major player in search. That is why I gave Yahoo! so much credit. But now it looks like many of the other engines are well into the RSS game.

Daniel Brandt, aka Everyman, started a thread over at Search Engine Watch forums named that was renamed to AutoLink & Google As Anti-Webmaster. In this thread, Daniel takes shots at Google, he is known for it and he is proud to do so, I think its great for the industry. (Back on topic).

About a week ago, Google releases the Google Toolbar 3.0, in that release came the option for "AutoLink". AutoLink is described by Google as:

when clicking the Toolbar's AutoLink button will automatically create a link to an online map (US addresses only). AutoLink can also link package tracking numbers to delivery status, VIN numbers (US) to vehicle history, and publication ISBN numbers to Amazon.com listings.

Daniel claims that "Google is essentially changing their pages by adding links where links did not exist before. These links take the toolbar user off of the page. Potentially they are a new source of revenue for Google, because the same technology can be used by Google to link to ads."

There is a nice debate going on in the forums now, so check out the thread.

The internet likes the word free, and one of the benefits of using free content is because you don't pay for it. Yet with anything free on the internet, there comes a price, and sometimes free content may carry one all its own. There is a good thread at SEOchat describing just this and many of the members are giving feedback as to what the pro's and con's are of using this type of content.

Some are reporting that a lot of the free content isn't cracking up to be: free. One of the main problems is that people are using these articles multiple times in many different locations. I mean its free right? Why wouldn't you paste it on your site in hopes it does whats its supposed to do: Get Readers. If you didn't grab the article first or at least get it spidered first then, you may not really realize the traffic you had hoped to obtain. Personally, I don't use Free Content to publish on my sites. I either write the article myself and create all the marketing and information copy, or I hire someone to write the article for me on an area that deserves a large amount of research I don't have time for. It's actually not relatively expensive to hire a copywriter to make this happen for you. Average people (non-copywriters) can write content just as fine as one that does it professionally. I have heard stories about people hiring college students, friends, family, and those that have time to write some content on whatever subject that might interest them.

One of the members, oldmanrunner mentions that a good way to get around getting caught for duplicate content is to place "different headers, different titles and descriptions, swap a paragraph or two and change a few words" and you should be fine. Other members are reporting that they are removing many of the articles they have put on their site after the recent update, as it didn't help them. Others are saying that free content has returned substantial amount of traffic for their site.

A place that should be on your radar if you are using free content is Copyscape for checking to see how many people are using the same article, it will not however tell you whether its the article is benefical to your site. Another tool that comes highly recommend is a Similar Page Checker that compares the two articles to look for differences. You can also use something I really fond of, its the program called Beyond Compare that compares everything from articles to php documents.

Something funny, but a member asks where in the world you would get content for a site entitled "Green Squirrel Shirts". I can't say I have ever come across an article or company entitled that. Maybe you could get articles pertaining to various species of squirrels, or the benefits of wearing green squirrel shirts, or the benefits of wearing a green shirt with a squirrel on it. ;-)

Continue discussing free content on SEOchat.

As a follow up to what makes for a successful AdSense sites we have a new thread at WebmasterWorld named How to pick a good paying subject and get targeted ads. This thread discusses how Senior WMW member, ogletree, locates high paying keywords and then creates pages that target those high paying keywords.

It is important to note that you can create a page that is "targeting" a high paying keyword but does not generate high pay per clicks.

The Search Engine Strategies NYC 05 is a week from today. We will have extensive coverage at the blog. Ben and I will be covering the sessions we attend in detail, feel free to make requests here. Also, Andy Beal is giving away 50% coupons!

There is an excellent thread over at WebmasterWorld named What kind of site does it take... What kind of site does it take to make a enough money from AdSense to live your life?

The first response is "The key is really the domain names and not the website, especially during the early stages." But it is quickly argued on. Google's AdSense department is quick to review and boot many sites that participate in the program that are not up to their standards.

There are many ways to make money with adsense. I know people that have a "search engine" that is simply AdSense driven. I know others that buy misspellings of popular domain names and throw up AdSense. I know some that build up huge content sites. There are many ways to make for a successful AdSense site.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Click Adjustment Upward? reports many are seeing adjustments being made to their accounts where Google is giving them more money. I personally saw a small adjustment to lower the payment made to my account, but I probably am not a representative sample.

One member reports "Instead of having 2 of the worst earnings days in 12 months, I have the 2nd and 4th best days of all time."

Good news!

Seems like this has been up for a while, but I have never seen the Google Request for Volunteer Translators before. You can sign up quickly, all you need is a Google account. Lots of languages are a 100% complete, see the language status page for languages that remain to be translated. Even if a language is 100% translated, it is possible that they add more "messages to the Google interface" according to the FAQs. Of course to qualify, you must follow the style guide and agree to the "Legal Stuff" as they call it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google does track clicks, but do they use this data to place page A over page B? Proof that they track links, well, I did a search on rustybrick and then moused over the first result. I saw the following target URL, http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.rustybrick.com/&e=10012 - see for yourself.

View Large Image

So, does this click tracking affect a site's rankings? Many people I meet that are "computer savvy" ask me if Google determines page rank by user clicks. Of course I laugh, but its a solid question. Direct Hit was an engine that based a page's rankings on click data, but that didn't last too long.

In all honesty, does the click data affect relevancy? You have to think so, on some level. Google is probably storing this data in order to do UI testing, relevancy testing and other kinds of testing. So on some small level, one can argue it affects relevancy and possibly a page's rank. But it is known, that clicking on your page in Google over and over again will not shoot your site up to the number one slot.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I find this a little bit embarrassing for Google. SearchViews reported two days ago, last Friday, that a search in Google on the keyword Heineken brings back Google Image results at the top of the main Web results. One of the two results is not suited for young audiences.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! says that Yahoo! is conservative when it comes to displaying image results within the main Web search results. For example, you can get pictures of Heineken with a query term such as heineken pictures or pictures of heineken.

Andrew Goodman wrote an article on the Black Hat, White Hat & Lots of Gray session at Search Engine Watch, the name of the article is Search Engine Showdown: Black Hats vs. White Hats at SES. That brought some new life to an old thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In addition this prompted two articles by white hat panelist Alan Perkins named; SEO : Sleepwalking Ever Onwards? and Ethical Search Engine Optimization Explained.

SEOmike just started the a game called "Ethical, Who am I" in the thread.

How can you say that this is not funny. Might look a bit unprofessional, might seem childish, as some members suggest - but I personally find that it goes well with the forum.

Basically, it looks at different stats on your forum usage and assigns you a different type of belt based on that data. I am not exactly sure the data points that determine who gets a green belt with yellow strips over a normal green belt, but who cares. :)

Forum discussion at SEO Chat.

I started a thread over at Search Engine Watch forums named Scraping the Engines - Other Choices?, which discussed the recent news of a new threadwatch tool. I discussed how I was annoyed by the lack of "choices" and options the SEO community has when it comes to digging deeper into the data that drives the off page criteria of a page's search rankings. So much so that I am beginning to 'feel' that some search engines are going out of there way to mock the SEO community.

Of course there is a lot of that going the other way, just to be fair.

The thread discusses a specific case of a tool, in which I lead into a discussion about the reality (IMO) of the true bridge that has been built between the search engines and the search engine optimizers.

This is just a mockery of the US legal work process, in my opinion. Little company buys a domain name "seattle-mortgage-loans.com", soon after a company named "Seattle Mortgage" sends a cease and desist letter. In fact, they don't want this small company to come up in the top results for the term seattle mortgage. This is just very sad. Thread over at Search Engine Watch Forums named Little Guy Sued Over Generic Name Use.

Nacho, the mod over at Search Engine Watch Forums notified me yesterday that he received an email from Google's Gmail department that he is invited. He already had a gmail account but since he signed up on the list of people who wanted a gmail invite, directly at gmail, he got an other. For a sample of the email, check out this Search Engine Watch Thread.

There has been forum discussion on how AdSense is not allowed in emails at WebmasterWorld. In fact, here is the first known sighting of adsense in an email reported over at WebmasterWorld. In that second thread, they describe how one would add AdSense into an email. Back on March 25th, I wrote an entry on this named Adding AdSense to Emails, which points to a DigitalPoint thread on the topic.

But now, Jenstar at her blog JenSense writes an entry named AdSense in email newsletters for regular publishers. In that entry, she says that "Google AdSense has allowed a select number of publishers to run AdSense ads in their newsletters." She quotes an article at eWeek that confirms this:

Google plans to eventually expand the newsletter option beyond its direct AdSense partners to include the smaller publishers who use AdSense's online self-service program.

You can add this to the list of cool features about Google Search. There is a thread on SEW forums reporting that Google is dynamically placing content that is in the first sentence of a paragraph inside the title tag. For websites that contain the generic "index" that is often left in the title, Google has developed a way to instead of give you "index", it will find the most relevant piece of content and place it in the title.

One of the members reports that this might have been happened since last week. Barry sent me the Google Search that would return this result, instead of getting the sentence appear in the title tag, I got the following (thanks Shawn for the screenshot):

[See #5 where it says "index"]
View image

Upon refreshing my browser I got search results (with an increase in ranking position - jumped from #5 to #4):

Now, I was trying to get back the original search that showed the "index" in the title, and found that if you modified the search you could get the results back if you knew originally what was in the title. See this search result. As you can see its back to being "index".

Pretty cool. If you are happening to see this as well, post a comment with the particular search.

Late December I posted an entry here named Ask Jeeves: The Little Engine That Could, where I aired out my concern with this search engine. The feedback was fabulous, and even Jim Lanzone (Senior Vice President) responded. Since then, Ask Jeeves has done a lot, including:

(1) TV Commercials
(2) Discussions about Open Sourcing Search
(3) Acquiring Bloglines
(4) Increased communication through Ask Jeeves Blog and Jeeves Coming Out

And now I see that they have removed the 7 of the 10 top sponsored results. They have place only 3 top sponsored results at the top and then is showing those juicy natural results. I stumbled across this while defending Ask Jeeves at an SEO Chat thread. So I tested out a few random searches, such as iPod and I only get 3 sponsored results as such

So these results seem to be looking fine. Also, check out a search on What is Ask Jeeves?. Those "Related Topics" are very humorous. :)

Go to Yahoo.com and press your tab key. It will rotate between the different search options. It looks something like this:

Thread at WebmasterWorld.

Added, this also works over at MSN, but Yahoo!'s is cooler. :)

A thread over at WebmasterWorld named Home page indexed twice discusses how two members noticed that their home page URLs are listed twice in Yahoo! Search results. Same URL, same content, two listings.

Seems strange. WMW moderator, agerhart, says one word, "Penalty."

Senior Member, internetheaven, adds by saying;

I'm afraid that all evidence points to that. I have only one site that displays this phenomenon and has been doing so for almost a year now.
It is also the only site of mine ever to receive a penalty from Yahoo which it has been carrying for almost two years. Considering it was a programming error I think a two year ban is a little harsh but hey, what do I know .........

True? I have a feeling we will hear from Yahoo! in that thread, if it is not true.

As a continuation of yesterday's thread on the topic of Google PageRank Basics, a new thread popped up at WebmasterWorld named Does PageRank Affect Your Ranking in Google?.

In this new thread, WebmasterWorld administrator ciml argues that "PR has a direct influence on ranking for a given search phrase but the direct influence is very small indeed." Then goes on to say "Also, PageRank is useful for other things (e.g. crawl depth and frequency) but the direct influence on rankings of having more PageRank is, as Macro put it, "small enough a consideration to be ignored"."

So the question put forth is PageRank too small of a factor that is should be ignored? This should make for an interesting thread, at least the several posts there now make for a good read.

This Monday I posted a new thread over at Search Engine Watch forums under the title Phi - "Google and the Golden Ratio". The goal of the thread was to get some of the more scientific minds into the discussion on this new theory on Google. The theory is that Google may be using Phi (1.618) as a ratio for the "natural" level of anchor text pointing to a document.

One of the new PhDs over at SEW Forums named Xan chimes in with a little history:

Phi. The hermetic rule of the golden mean. This goes back as far as the Egyptians, the romans, all those dudes back then who used it supposedly for their architecture. I know many speculate that the pyramids were built based on this. There's a very close relationship between Pi and Phi. Leonardo was a fan as well, and people think it can be found in the human body as well. Some say its divine and the work of god.

But what really makes me smile is his comment that reads;

The coolest thing about Phi? When subtracted from its square it results in 1. Beautiful.

Reminds me of my days in university when I used to think passionately about a regression models and funky looking graphs. But that is long gone.

But what is the bottom line on this? Well most feel that this is not being used by Google for many reasons. As Xan puts it, "Phi is just one amongst many. Why Phi was chosen? Its the golden equation. It is beautiful, but it is a bit useless in this case. Its the wrong tool for the job."

Well, not my site, but EliteWeb, received an email from Google, which basically asked EliteWeb to allow Google to index the site. EliteWeb said "I received an email from someone at google telling me the benefits of allowing the google spider to index my site. The site in question has a robots.txt file disallowing all search engines."

Moderator DaveN, said that he also received an email like that some time ago. With DaveN, his site was banned, he then disallowed Google from going to the site, Google sent a reinclusion request to DaveN for the site and he removed the no index. Then Google came back, indexed it, ranked it, and then banned it again 3 months later.

The question is, what would trigger a Reinclusion Request Directly from Google. Seems very unlike them.

Forum thread at WebmasterWorld.

Wondering why Mark Jen was fired from Google? Most of you can make an educated guess, but if you want the information from the horses mouth - then you need to interview Mr. Jen. Mark Jen was the Google Employee that was fired after blogging about his experience working over at Google. Gelf Magazine has posted an entry named Interview With Fired Google Blogger, that has the details.

"At first, they beat around the bush," Jen said. "But then they told me my blog had upset people and that I wasn't a good fit. I asked them if there was anything I could do to change their minds, but it was a one-sided conversation. So I said 'I'll see you guys later.' "

One of the more scarier spam'ish tactics being deployed out there was the Hijacking of Google results through redirects. A post over at Search Engine Watch Forums named Evidence of Progress with Redirects/Hijacks?

In this post, "DaveAtIFG", old time admin at WMW writes that he was shown an example of a possible hijacking attempt that was put down by Google. When he dug deeper, he noticed several things:

1. When I click on/follow the link in the Google SERP, it goes directly to Liane's site bypassing the listed domain, island-search.com.
2. Also, when I follow the Google link, I see a 204 "No Content" Response code. (I've NEVER seen this used before, but perhaps I simply never noticed.)
3. Google's cache of the "island-search.com" page displays Liane's site, sans images.
4. If I surf directly to the URL included in Google's listing (www .island-search.com/go.php?id=3034), I see a 302 response code.
5. A not very thorough search of the island-search.com site revealed two "normal" links to Liane's site, both return a 200 response.

Lots of rumors about Ask Jeeves Joins Forces with Enhance to Offer Google AdWords Alternative, which turn out to be false.

Big no no on Enhance's part?.?.

I don't have much to say about this. I was chatting with a few folks about this, who will remain nameless, and this is what they had to say about it.

my life is complete! the new google toolbar is out!!!

Google is launching its third rev of its toolbar today. It's Windows only, and it's a beta:

"It's free and takes seconds to install." screw it then - I don't have time for that ;)

There's no need to check for new versions of Google Toolbar; updates are installed automatically, so you'll always have the latest and greatest version.

That is enough quotes for now. Two good blog postings on this; one at SEW Blog and an other at BattelleMedia.

The toolbar page at Google can be found here.

Currently, no forum discussion that I have found, so I posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums. Now WebmasterWorld thread.

Whenever i see this guy William Hung of American Idol, I laugh. Ask Jeeves, according the the AJ Blog, will be airing a commercial during tonight American Idol, that stars William Hung. To see the commercial click on the image below.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

I think Text Link Ads is an incredibly smart company when it comes to marketing. Not just because they are a long time sponsor of this site, but also because they are one of the most visible companies in the SEO industry. The latest marketing ploy Text Link Ads went into was announced today in a entry named Threadwatch to Build Killer Link Analysis Tool, Give it Away Free. Nick Wilson says that:

* TLA pay for the initial development
* JasonD and DaveN provide the programming and technical expertise respectively
* We ask you what features you want in a dream link analysis tool
* We build it, based on your input
* We give it away for FREE

It is going to be free! I spoke with Patrick Gavin over at Text Link Ads and he told me that "the specs will be built based on what the community wants it to be. We believe it will be the best link analysis tool on the market and the best part is it will be 100% FREE."

On a side note: I have built my own Advanced Link Analysis Tool but it only uses the Google API and I haven't tested it out in a really long time.

You don't often see threads that discuss how to get more Web directories in the Google SERPs. Often, you see threads complaining about how there are too many Web directories cluttering up the results. A thread at WebmasterWorld named Keeping directories in Google discusses just that.

Duplicate content in my opinion is one of the major reasons many directories are not ranking well in the SERPs at Google. So what do the forum experts recommend?

(1) User submitted listings vs. editor submitted listings: Again, I do not believe there would be a difference between the two. As long as all listings are reviewed by humans and the listings are not outright spam, the content should be fine. If you simply scrap other directories or create a dmoz clone, then you can run into the duplicate content issue.

(2) Never allow for empty directories. Let users suggest categories if there are none that fit their listing's criteria. But do not publish empty categories.

(3) Having good category descriptions help with generating unique quality content. So if you are cloning an directory, then that might help with the duplicate content issues.

(4) Don't you just love those directories that have no true listings, but what you really see are AdSense ads or other 2nd or 3rd tier PPC ads.

(5) Be creative, allow users to rate listings, add comments and be interactive with the directory.

This thread is turning into something great, so check it out. (Hows that for a call to action)

There is nothing like a fresh thread on some up-to-date information on the basics of Google's PageRank to make me smile. A new thread at WebmasterWorld, which was featured right away, under the title of Google PR Basics, answers many basic questions many people have. Here are a listing of some questions, for the answers, check out the thread.

What is Page Rank (PR)?

How can I check my PR?

How does page rank affect your listing in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)?

What detrimental effects will I face for buying PR?

Why is my PR more in the Google directory than it is on the toolbar?

How can I retain PR on my site and prevent it from going to other sites?

So if PR doesn't determine how I rank then what does?

A 403 Forbidden is not accident according to the W3.org;

The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated. If the request method was not HEAD and the server wishes to make public why the request has not been fulfilled, it SHOULD describe the reason for the refusal in the entity. If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 404 (Not Found) can be used instead.

A moderator over at SEO Chat is getting this 403 error when conducting any search over at Google. Some report that this only occurs when using Internet Explorer, can it be spyware?

Others feel it might have to do with one of the following reasons, and I quote:

- You're using a dialup line (with dynamic IP), and there are some search-spammers using the same provider.
- Someones's using your PC as a zombie for search-spamming.
- You're using a proxy (maybe even transparent) that is been used heavily by a spammer.

Specifically with Google, how does Google handle duplicate content from around the Web? It happens all the time. For example, your or I write an article, the article is then syndicated on sites like SEOToday.com, SearchEngineJournal.com, SearchEngineWatch.com, and the New York Times (yea right). So now you have your unique content not only on your site but at 3,4,5, etc. sites. Search engines, especially Google, does not want the same results with the same content coming up for its searcher. But this also happens frequently when you send data feeds of your products on your e-commerce site to shopping search engines. What you might find is that Google will show the shopping search engine's results and your e-commerce site will not show at all for that keyword phrase.

Why does this happen? That is the exact question over at Cre8asite Forums.

You can't blame the engines for wanting only one "source" document in the results. You can't blame the original source of the content to want his/her document to be considered the single "source" document.

The issue arises when you have two or more documents with the same content. Then it is up to the search engine to figure out which is the original source document. How do they do this? Well with Google we have some clues, as pointed out by Bill Slawski in the thread. He quotes a Google patent named Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate files. Thank goodness he took up a quote from the patent:

In response to the detected duplicate documents, the present invention may also function to eliminate duplicate documents (e.g., keeping the one with best PageRank, with best trust of host, that is the most recent) Alternatively, the present invention may function to generate clusters of near-duplicate documents, in which a transitive property is assumed (i.e., if document A is a near-duplicate of document B, and document B is a near-duplicate of document C, then document A is considered a near-duplicate of document C). Each document may have an identifier for identifying a cluster with which it is associated. In this alternative, in response to a search query, if two candidate result documents belong to the same cluster and if the two candidate result documents match the query equally well (e.g., have the same title and/or snippet) if both appear in the same group of results (e.g., first page), only the one deemed more likely to be relevant (e.g., by virtue of a high PageRank, being more recent, etc.) is returned.

PageRank can be one of the main considerations as to which document is the original source, because, in Google's mind, PageRank tells them which documents are more trusted.

Relevancy can also be the determining factor, if the New York Times publishes my article, maybe the other text on the page will be less relevant to the topic of the article. Maybe the links and the content around the primary content will be less relevant to the article. And maybe Google will rank my document as the source.

"Best Trust of Host", I have a feeling that has to do with your linkage data. Bill suggests that it might be "Authorities and Hubs", and although Google is not known to utilize the concept of Authorities and Hubs as would Teoma/Ask Jeeves it seems like the most logical explanation to me. The nodes are interconnected and determining the (maybe) PageRank of those hosts to determine if your the original source, well it sounds cool.

And the "age of the document" as Bill explains. But then they would need to store temporal data of some kind. Simply looking at the page header information would not really be sufficient.

I admit, I no very little about contracts when it comes to SEO jobs. I do not sell "SEO Services", I do not offer "guaranteed positions" and I don't pitch that I will rank your pages in the top results. So when it comes to contracts for me, I do not have to worry about things outside of my control (i.e. Google's Updates, Sandbox and others). But that does not mean that I do not put everything I know into ensuring a Web site is properly coded for the engines and have an outstanding internal linking structure. But I sell Web applications and high end Web sites, not top rankings.

For those of you that sell SEO services and you are looking to protect yourself, from what you need protection, check out a thread at Search Engine Watch where moderator (and I believe former lawyer), mcanerin, posts a detailed sample SEO contract.

He warns:

Be warned that it was intended to be a very complete version - I have another, simplified version I use most of the time. This one is so complete it's been known to scare away small business people who are used to dealing on a "handshake" level.


On the other hand, if you are dealing with a large corporation or a client that is in a foreign territory, this can be very useful for spelling everything out.

Plus he is willing to explain the details of the contract if you have questions.

At this point, the contract is not downloading, seems to be down at the moment. I'll check back later.

I started a thread yesterday on SEOchat that detailed some of the frustrations from some clients of mine that have been confused with the large amount of authority related pages taking up the first 10 positions in Google. Essentially dubbed "authority spam". Sites like Amazon, Bizrate, Superpages, Yellowpages, eBay, Switchboard, Barnes and Noble take up the first 5-10 listings of a particular search. The results are so unsatisfactory that you skip to the next page or do a search all over again keeping a mental picture of the last sites you saw. Tracking this behavior is another subject in itself. This thread quickly turned into an excellent discussion relating to authorities, fake authorities, searcher's behavior, and the ways for which to counteract authority domination.

I asked members what methods they used to counteract authority spam. For the most part this is not difficult SEO, it most often requires a few backlinks and some content changes. However for some areas its not that simple. So how do you compete with such giants? EGOL, on of the moderator mentioned buy common stock in the company, work hard, and open an eBay store. The eBay store in particular seems to be working well for several people. SEO_AM comments that his competition is Amazon, .edu, and .gov sites, and that these are NOT the sites that people are not looking for. They are looking for something better.

The discussion turned into a overview of what makes up an authority and their right to be in such positions. Amazon and eBay are mentioned in detail. There are those that claim to be able to create "fake authorities" in the search engines. I would call them more "hubs" than anything, but it is possible. How would you create such a site?

Continue discussing Authority Spam & Sites at SEOchat

Today, DigitalPoint Forums hit the milestone of breaking 100,000 posts. DigitalPoint Forums has a slightly unique angle then the other SEO forums, in that it caters to (1) a more technical (programming not scientific) outlook on SEO and (2) has a wide base of feedback on DP's tools.

I would like to congratulate DigitalPoint Forums on reaching this outstanding milestone. Feel free to stop by the forum and post in your own note at the 100,000 Posts thread.

Phil Craven has one of the more popular documents on PageRank named PageRank Explained. A person by the name of Michael Martinez posted in several forums (SEW, Spider Food and others) a thread named A rebuttal of Phil Craven's "Google Explained", where he tried to find flaws in the article. His rebuttal is long, detailed, but flawed according to two individuals (not including Phil Craven).

Ammon Johns, in a thread at Cre8asite Forums discussing this topic, said:

If Martinez can show that Google aren't doing that he'll be famous.


However, he seems to miss what that average is about. It is a normalization value that is absolutely fundamentally essential, and is the entire reason that the reiterative link calculations can work. The convergence of the average value of 1 is where the reiterative calculations can stop reiterating.


The value of 1 helps ensure that there is not more total link popularity than there is links to create it. It means that on average, across the web as a whole, a link is worth 1 link, and not on an endless scale where the value of one single link has no true value, thus causing all other calculations to be valueless. It would seem that Martinez is no mathematician.

If Ammon's word is not good enough for you, how about the word from the individual who wrote the first (I believe) PageRank article, Chris Ridings (see PeterD's interview with Chris). ChrisR replies in with his thoughts on the rebuttal at the Spider Food forum.

I do not believe Phil Craven, Ammon Johns and Chris Ridings are all buddies, so its not only makes for a good technical read, but also it can be a bit humorous.

Google Advertising Professionals was launched early November and Google has started to accept individual companies and professionals into the program. The logo that makes one Google AdWords professional stand out from the next looks something like:

There is currently a thread about the those who were and were not accepted to the program at WebmasterWorld named Anyone now have their Pro logo?. Congrats to the pros!

To see an example of one company that has been approved, check out Aderit Internet Marketing, on the bottom right you will see the sporty logo.

I still am strong about the definition of a site being 'sandboxed' is for it to not rank in the top 3 for its unique company name. So for my corporate site not to rank number one for "rustybrick" that would mean my site is sandboxed. Of course, people argue with me, but since this site was one of the first (if not the first) to capture the name "sandbox" from a thread at WebmasterWorld, I kind of can claim that the definition is what I stated above. Enough about the true definition.

There is a fun thread over at WebmasterWorld named How many MIA sites are there?. It might be healthy to let it out in that thread. :)

For some reason, MSN Search, when prompted to do search can return 8, 9, or 10 results on the first results page. What I mean is that it is sporadic, based on keyword search. Do a search on one keyword phrase and you might get 8 results found on the first page, do a search on an other keyword phrase and you might get 10 results on the first page.

There is a thread that brought this up, but no theories as to why MSN does this. The thread is at Search Engine Watch Forums and it is named 8 - 10 results per search.

Our normal round up for the search engines when they commemorate holidays, click on the logos below to take you to where the engines would take you to. Normally they take you to a search "valentine's day" but Ask Jeeves forgot to change the link to a search on valentine's day from the when they mocked Google's ski trip.

Without making enemies, because that is not my intention, I want to say, this seems to be all fun and games. There is this member named "relaxzoolander" who started off posting at SEO Chat, then took a break and went over to SEO Guy's forum. At SEO Chat he started the Club Relaxzoolander, I believe at one point I was in that club. I do not remember for sure. Anyway, for some reason, many wanted to be included in this "exclusive" group. Personally, I did not get it, but it seemed very innocent and fun. Shortly after, "Relaxzoolander" went off on vacation and that was the last I heard about him.

Recently, I found a link from an SEO Chat member's signature that let to a thread at SEO Guy's forum named relaxzoolander survivor - who gets the axe?. Basically, members are voting on who should be booted from the club. For some strange reason, this whole club reminds me of the book, the Lord of the Flies. That is my forum community post for the day.

Again, no disrespect meant at all. Please do not take this entry the wrong way.

I have heard so many stories of SEOs that have been booted from editing the DMOZ directory, I bet you have as well. A post at Search Engine Watch forums named DMOZ Abuse for SEO Contest discusses a case where one individual stepped over that line.

Basically, the "reported" abuse is by someone who is an editor at the Israeli DMOZ Directory and also is participating in the 1st Israeli SEO Contest.

Things just don't stop shaking over at the Google Data Centers. There are more reports, this morning, of major search results positions changes at the 104 data center. Reports can be found at SEO Chat and WebmasterWorld.

There are some open source search engine initiatives taking place right now, one such example is Nutch. But what if, what if, Ask Jeeves, one of the "big four" took its engine and brought it to the open source community. I believe that is the topic of discussion at the Ask Jeeves blog, under the recent entry they wrote Mozilla's on Fire.

Many people are speculating an Ask Jeeves branded firefox browser. But that seems a bit too simple.

In the entry, Ask, discusses three things:

(1) Making Ask Jeeves desktop search an open source project.

(2) AJ-branded or co-branded Firefox browser.

(3) Technology called Octopus, which can benefit from the XUL platform.

They seem very interested and inspired by the open source community. I wonder, if a company like Ask Jeeves (publicly traded) can take such a step.

I opened this up for discussion at the Search Engine Watch Forums, I would love to hear what you have to say.

There has been a recent sighting of the famed GoogleGuy on WMW forums. Normally I wouldn't post directly about such a post but this one seems to provide an outlet for those that would like to comment about the search results to engineers. You can comment directly to Google, without going through the extra step of user support. Is your site gone completely? Rankings disappear? Would like to see a good quality site in the serps? Find a spammy site in the results? Just maybe want to vent a little? Many people are very frustrated with the results of the last update, for some though - this is just another update. He does go on to make a very good point, that with every update some site move to the first page and some move out and that is the way it is. According to GoogleGuy they:

"Test everything in depth before [we] deploy it to ensure that the changes improve quality, but I always want to hear feedback on spammy or low-quality sites in our results (or high-quality sites that people feel aren't where they deserve to be). I created a Google Group that you can send feedback to.

If you're especially happy or unhappy with something in our search results right now, this is the best way to tell us.

However I would avoid responses like the following if you expect to get a response (I have elaborated for comic effect):

Dear Googleguy,
Why don't you ever let us know what's going on. Clearly there is a sandbox and clearly sites are getting duplicate penalties from 302 redirects caused by PHP tracking scripts. Clearly I have a PR2 site that ranked #1 for a 360,000,000 result keyword but it is blocked from the index because of the 302 redirect problem. Clearly someone besides my 4 year old is playing in the sandbox. Are Larry and Sergey reading this email? When are you going to push the magic red button and fix this. Froogle ain't paying the bills you know. If I don't get a response in 2 hrs I am going to call my lawyer.
Signed,
Frustrated Website Owner

Long, long ago, in an age where there was only the "big three", MSN was powered by Inktomi. If you want to step back in the past - it has been a month now? - and see the old MSN, visit http://sea.search.msn.com/. It is currently showing Inktomi (known as Yahoo! Search) results at that special URL. The new MSN is its own beast and has its own results.

Forum discussion at SEO Chat Forums.

Jason Dowdell gave me an exclusive on a new patent filed by Become.com named "AIR" - affinity index ranking. Jason tells me that its going to provide much better results because humans can identify certain sites / pages that are high in rich content and then the machine learning algorithm takes that feedback and scales. He goes on to explain that "they're able to add the human touch to their algo in a way that scales because they're in a specific vertical - none of the other engines can do that." I believe they actually call some of these online stores and then add them to a special "reservoir". Jason adds that "google / yahoo / msn use the random link method".

Earlier today, we discussed that Become.com went Beta. Well, again, Jason Dowdell, provides the inside scoop with an entry he named Become's Got Talent. In that entry he writes that John Glick from Yahoo! has left Yahoo! to join Become.com. This is a big wow factor!

Also he notes that "Chris Kermoian, formerly of Alta Vista is the Vice President of Product Management and has some great new features in the pipeline for Become."

This sounds very exciting. More to come shortly on some technology advancements made by become.com.

Yahoo! was unable to comment on this as of yet.

Google fanatics, jump over to SEO Chat Forums and vote on your default Google data center. Currently .104 is leading the way with 18 votes or 78% of the votes.

There is nothing like good old fashion content scrapping to generate high end, cheap, weird looking content. There are many people who do it. There are many ways to do it. I am calling out one content spammer, because he is messing with our forums. And you should know not to mess with our forums. :)

http://qaix.com/ - no link for you

They have reportedly ripped content from WebmasterWorld, SEO Chat and other forums on the Web. I spot people ripping my content off all the time, its a full time job to track these people down.

Remember the Nigritude Ultramarine Google SEO contest? Well, a reader emailed me that there is now an Israeli Google SEO Contest, for the term לתור מוטור also known as "Seraphim Proudleduck". I found it cute, he sent me the PRWeb release and Google Blogoscoped wrote about it. So lets give him a link, so he can win, לתור מוטור.

Here are the current standings. Good luck all.

Danny Sullivan has confirmed that "the big four" (Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, & MSN) will be at the Indexing Summit on Day 2 of the SES NYC conference. Although I only see three individuals on the panel, none from MSN. It happens to be the same day Yahoo!'s Yang will be giving the Keynote (big thing for SES).

Danny Sullivan has started a thread at the Search Engine Watch forums asking to "please share what you'd like considered" at the indexing summit. So far there has been great feedback. I'll bullet point some of the points shared in the thread, but if you have any ideas, join the ideas for the indexing summit thread.

• Future of search
• Temporal link analysis on its way?
• Responses to questions about organic search for specific sites
• 302 Issues
• Park Domain Indexing
• Including pages without content but with linkage data
• The new no follow attribute
• Discuss Referral String Issues
• Issues with linkage data and abuse.

And so on...

Become.com Beta launched recently. Jason Dowdell has some inside coverage over at his blog named Marketing Shift, worth a read. And we have some forum coverage at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I hear exciting things about this new specialty engine. But it looks awkwardly like Google, but just yellow. :)

I finally made the switch from My Yahoo to Bloglines as my primary RSS reader. I have always set my browser's homepage to My Yahoo, but when I switched to Firefox from Safari, by default, the homepage was the page that loaded. My Yahoo loaded slightly on the slow side and I wanted a page that loaded quickly. I tested Bloglines and it seemed to load fast, it also shows entries I did not read by session.

I find it very useful, just wish I can add a keyword search for news feeds like Yahoo! allows for Yahoo! News. Who knows, it might be part of bloglines.

And if your using bloglines, feel free to:

It is interesting how the major four tend to discuss similar topics at the same time. Yesterday, I wrote on the topic of Ask Jeeves's Crawl Delay, where the Ask Jeeves rep clarified some of the rumors out there on how Ask handles it. Late last night, Yahoo! posts an entry at the Yahoo! Blog named Yahoo! Search Tips for Webmasters: Saving Bandwidth. One of the tips provided included using Yahoo!'s Crawl-Delay. In fact, Yahoo! constantly reminds Webmasters to use this parameter as the conferences. I believe the only other engine that made a big point of this was MSN.

Other tips:
- Gzipped Files - did this, but the day after I had a major sever crash, probably unrelated but I am done with this method. I rather pay for more bandwidth then try it again.
- Smart Caching - we do this all the time, it works great for many reasons, not only for saving bandwidth.

In one of Seth Godin's maddening blog posts about the SEO industry he wrote,

"Just a short time ago, SEO was seen as a shortcut by marketers unwilling to do the hard work of actually making a product and a site that mattered. In that era, SEO was the quick way to get cheap traffic—cheap so you could afford to waste it."

What's infuriating to me is that he must've had a very bad date with a dishonest SEO/SEM company, because it was no "short time ago" in my book. As far as I could see, way back in the late 1990's when I was an SEO, there was trouble. I made no guarantee's to clients about how rich and famous they'd get when I was done because in many cases, their sites were in bad shape.

No amount of SEO hoola hoop manuvers was going to help them as long as their business requirements didn't have "Design it so customers can use it" written in there somewhere.

I'm not the only one who recognized the disconnect between marketing for search engines and design that sells. Nestled inside more and more companies are usability specialists working alongside web designers and SEO's. This trend is booming.

When my blog was selected by usability and web design tools software developers, TechSmith, as their Blog of the Month for February, they wondered if I'd write about this very topic.

Which I did, in Why Search Engine Marketing Has A Passion for Web Site Usability

It's not that I expect Seth Godin will read it. But it sure feels to pull out my pom poms once in awhile and cheer you all on.

One day, recently, Google became a registrar and then we scratched our heads about the possibility that they would use it for advanced link mapping. But that was ruled down by an email sent t me by Nick Wilsdon from e3Internet that said Google can not use registrar data.

But now a thread at SearchGuild that quotes a NY Times article saying:

Eileen Rodriguez, a Google spokeswoman, hardly quelled the speculation by explaining that the whole thing was really a learning opportunity for the company. Google "has become a domain name registrar to learn more about the Internet's domain name system," she said recently in an e-mail message. "While we have no plans to register domains at this time, we believe this information can help us increase the quality of our search results."

Huge hat tip to TopRank Blog.

The toolbars keep coming, right now, my firefox browser has about a inch of web page realestate and the remaining 12 inches are allocated to toolbars (kidding).

Yahoo released a Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox. Danny and Gary both blogged about it at the Search Engine Watch Blog. Yahoo Blogged on it as well.

Forum chatter at WebmasterWorld.

A thread at WebmasterWorld has a post where a member said he spoke with an Ask Jeeves engineer and they told him that they might be adding a parameter to tell the teoma spiders how "hard" to crawl. Now this is supposedly different then the Yahoo! Crawl Delay where, "You can add a "Crawl-delay: xx" instruction, where "xx" is the minimum delay in seconds between successive crawler accesses. If the crawler rate is a problem for your server, you can set the delay up to 60 or 300 or whatever value is comfortable for your server."

I am trying to find out more information about the validity of this WebmasterWorld thread and what it really means. In the thread, the member said the Ask Jeeves representative said that this is not a Crawl Delay. At this point, I do not see how a hard crawl would be anything else but a time delay.

The folks over at WebmasterWorld are reporting major Yahoo! changes over the past few days. I have seen some major changes with some keywords but not many.

Speaking about Librarians, Gary Price wrote an excellent, detailed and analytical blog entry at Search Engine Watch Blog named A Few Minutes With Google Maps.

It notes some of the comments left in my Google Maps entry.

He also pointed out that to me that when you "try searching Google Maps for the Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale", you won't find it. Try it out, http://maps.google.com/maps?q=yahoo%20in%20sunnyvale%20california.

Within the major Google update thread taking place at Search Engine Watch forums, Danny Sullivan posted a gem. Basically, he defends the argument that searchers are always happy with the results and the only ones to be bitter are SEOs.

Danny continues to explain by saying that most average searchers who are unhappy do not know of a forum to go to and express their dissatisfaction. And often, Danny explains, that the searcher "blame themselves" for searching wrong, when in fact, it is not necessarily the searcher's fault.

He goes on to explain that often the best people to find faults and weaknesses in the results are (1) Librarians and (2) SEOs. "Librarians, because they are often experts in areas, use search regularly and understand if something seems wrong." and SEOs because most know what it takes to get in the top results (when they keep emotions off the radar).

Not exactly SEO/SEM related but this is major enough to mention here. ThreadWatch.org reports on a Major Security Breach - WHOIS DB: Passwords Revealed over at Network Solutions. Basically, if you use NetSol as you register you are/were at risk. Nick Wilson confirmed it:

Confirmed - got sent a few whois queries to try and have seen a whole bunch of user passwords on NetSol - You can Try a Query Here - if your site is registered with NetSol then you may see your passord revealed in the results....

What would you call it, SEO or SEM? Today on Cre8asite forums there is an excellent thread where one of the members, Barry Welford, details an article he blogged on taking an overall aerial view of the SEM/SEO industry and where it might be headed. He questions what defines the industry as a whole? There has been discussion on this in the past, SEW in particular had a great thread last year about the history of SEM/SEO and why we call SEO...Search Engine Optimization? Do you know why? Generally since about that time or before then I have seen the adoption of "Search Marketing" as more of an accepted term to identify this group of marketers. I prefer these terms over SEO/SEM as it covers both, without having to explain what the acronyms mean to clients or friends.

One of the members Diane, who authored a very good blog entry on the existence of the SEO industry and the infamous nay-sayer Seth Godin who thinks there is none. Worth a good read here. She commented that the answer to this question is simple as defined by Webster:

a distinct group of productive or profit-making enterprises

The thread continues detailing the use of Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization today and how the term SEM has been adopted more and more by agencies and internet marketers. Barry W. goes on to make some grim predictions about the phrase "Search Engine Optimization" that it may eventually phase out of use in about 2-5 years time. I don't particularly agree with him, but I do understand where he is coming from. Using a better term for the industry such as one that contains the key term "marketing" will go further to strength the industry, where search engine optimization is contained below it as part of what you do in the industry. He says:

So I'm not saying bury the O. I'm saying trumpet the M, while continuing to milk the O.

:-) Nice quote.

They get into something called "sub optimization", but I will refrain from describing it as its a mathmatical term being applied to and paired with search engine optimization. The term means "Improving part of something may make the whole object less effective". Interesting, I guess as in a form of optimization making one part better, but loosing the effectiveness of the whole.

Finally one of the moderators jumps in and keeps the answer simple to the question in earnest:

As long as search engines exist, there will be a need for people to optimize sites for them.

Continue discussion the SEO Industry at Cre8asite Forums.

At DigitalPoint Forums, there is a thread in the register only forum that is named Contemplating Leaving DP... (must be registered). In that thread, a member discusses that he is dreaming about members and the forum at night. Let me take an except of the posting, for those who are not in the mood to register.

Contemplating Leaving DP...

...because mr SEbasic featured in my dream last night . (Don't worry, we only sat down for a meal...)
Not that I have a clue what he looks like but it was him. I know it was.
Can only mean one thing... Spending too much time here !
Saying this... I'll stay around. Only when it's AC or WeirFire I dream of then I'll reconsider by DP daily time spend.
I should be dreamin' about the DP girls...
Anyone else seeing unexpected adverse symptoms related to being here?

I found this incredibly funny. I would think that I would be dreaming this stuff, but thankfully, I have never had a dream that I remembered, that involved SEO forums or even SEO.

There is no doubt that most, if not all, SEOs are very pleased with how MSN Search is treating their Web pages. But does that make MSN more relevant? I won't be the one to say, yes, MSN Search is more relevant then Google, Yahoo or even Ask Jeeves. I was a bit surprised to see the reaction of some SEOs over at SEO Chat forums that said they are Switching to MSN.

It is one thing to be pleased with your rankings on a search engine. But to switch to a search engine because your highly optimized pages are doing well in the engine? That is just pride. Which makes me think...

Marketing... Relevancy... Marketing...

Which leads me back to an entry I wrote a while back about Relevancy's Importance in Microsoft's Quest. I am still scared.

Now that Google images are found in the main SERPs when conducting a normal Web search, it is time to look for ways to optimize your images for Google. Although, we discussed this in the past, there are new threads popping up on the topic, as an alternative way to drive targeted traffic to your site. One such new thread is at WebmasterWorld, under the name How to perform well in Google Image Search.

Besides for the white hat versus black hat link spam discussions, an other large topic that is debated in the wonderful world of SEO is to SEO by formula or to SEO by natural, organic, artistic means. What I mean by natural, organic, artistic means is - one should write copy so that it reads well and is user friendly. What I mean by SEO by formula is - one should test the copy to ensure it has the right amount of keyword density, right number of related words and so on.

There are those SEOs that do both. Some SEOs that write copy are actually so good at SEO Copywriting that they don't use formulas, they simply know what makes for good, optimized copy. In fact, most of the time, if you run it through one of those programs or have an algorithmic junky review the copy - they will agree that the copy is not bad. Then there are those who count the words on the page, ensure like (~) words are on the page enough times and run the page through programs.

Both work. One is pure science, and one is pure art. If you do not have the science part down and you do not have the art part down, then you simply don't have it. But practice does make perfect.

There is an interesting thread over at HighRankings, where typically you have the more artistic folks hang out. In that thread, they discuss a topic named Term Vector Theory and Keyword Weights (forum link to SEW), which was one of the many highly scientific threads started by Orion, Dr. E. Garcia, at SEW Forum. In this thread, you will see exactly what I am talking about above.

I don't mean to get on anyones bad side about a thread at HighRankings named "i'm Kinda Busy, Can You Send Me An Email?", Anybody ever hear this?, where well known SEO providers discuss how they often tell prospects to hang up the phone and send them an email with what they want.

I would never do that personally. Someone is looking for information about how my business can help their business, I'll talk to them about it. However, many in the thread prefer and sometimes require the initial discussion to take place over email. Maybe, I do not understand the SEO business. But in my business, I need to first learn about the client, the challenges they face, and get a feel of what they are willing to do to solve those challenges.

At the end of the call, I normally tell them that I will email them with more detail, on what I think will benefit them. Not the other way around. I put the effort into the initial call. Why? Because often, they do not understand what they need, because they do not know what options are available to them.

Again, this is just me. I have enough business at the time to turn people away. But, it does not mean that I turn my shoulder. Note, I am not saying that the people in the thread treat prospects wrong, I might have read the thread totally wrong. Read it for yourself here.

Back at the WebmasterWorld Conference in Las Vegas, a guy by the name of Daron Babin (aka SEGuru) launched WebmasterRadio.FM at http://www.webmasterradio.fm/. Since then, to be honest, rarely listened to any live show. Last night, I caught the first 30 minutes of a little show they call "SEO RockStars with hosts: Todd (Oilman) Friesen and Jake (bakedjake) Baillie." Last night's topic was about this Google update, with a nice discussion about what Oilman and BakedJake have personally experienced with this update. They discussed it is important to differentiate your anchor text, I think they also mentioned more deep linking and they also brought up the topic of LSI / LSA. That was fun. Anyway, if you haven't its worth checking out a show, check the schedule at http://www.webmasterradio.fm/.

A couple weeks ago we reported on how Google disabled an employees blog, because of his blog, ninetyninezeros, was just too revealing. So the story continued, cleaned up the blog, got some publicity and we went on with our lives. Now there are reports over at Google Blogoscoped of a forum post there named Mark Jen Googlewhacked.

Here is the post, from a member named "aconcernedgoogleemployee":

I regret to inform you that Mark Jen was fired from Google on Friday, January 28th. I don't have any details, but I can tell you that he was quietly let go. An e-mail was sent out to the entire company, letting us know that the matter many had written to management expressing their concerns about, had now been taken care of. I initially thought that this meant that Mark had been told to be more careful about discussing company financials, but it soon became apparent that Mark had left the company. I can only assume that his silence since that date means that they either threatened him or cut him a sweet severance deal. Whatever happened, it's a sad day when you can't speak openly about both the good and bad at your chosen place of work without getting silenced.

Ammon Johns, someone I highly respect in this industry, has announced that he is looking to hire and (even better) train an SEM who is already well experienced. Normally, I would not post these types of things on this site, but many of you who read here are well experienced and skilled SEMs/SEOs, and I thought this might be of interest to you. This seriously can be the opportunity of a life time for many of you, I would love to join Ammon but it just doesn't make sense for me at this time. My true love is outside of the SEO/SEM field and more in the Web business automation area.

But for you that live and breath SEO/SEM, and have heard the name Ammon Johns, this is something you probably do not want to pass up. For more information about the job based in the UK and the £70,000 price tag, check out the thread he posted at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I seriously hope this does not mean that we will be hearing and seeing less from Ammon. I highly doubt that is the case.

Oh, by the way, I am also hiring two hard core PHP / MySQL developers. More information at Craigs List. I will also personally train you in SEO/SEM, if you like. :) But SEM is a side part of the job, main part is to develop robust Web based applications that automate businesses.

This is that funny, check out http://www.gizoogle.com/, its basically uses the Google engine but puts the Snoop Dogg's twist to it. For example, it will "Translizzle" your page. I translated my company page and this is sample of what I got:

Original:

Since 1994, RustyBrick has been creating Web for businesses and organizations of all kinds. Using the latest Web technologies, we build the most dynamic and reliable sites on the World Wide Web. We have hard working, devoted developers with the skills to make your Web site a living, growing representation of your dreams.

Translizzled:

Since 1994, RustyBrick has been messin' Web fo' businizzles n organizzles of all kinds . Bow wow wow yippee yo yipee yay. Using tha latest Web technolizzles, we build tha miznost dynamic n reliable sites on tha World Wide Web . We have hard messin' devoted playa wit tha skills ta makes yo Web site a liv'n, grow'n representizzles of yo dreams.

Not bad. Forum discussion at Cre8asite.

Some news I left out yesterday, was that Google officially announced that they are including Google image results in the main search results when they find it relevant. We had reports of Google testing this back in late december when I wrote Google Test Images Within Google Web Search. Now when we all do a search on Charles Manson, you get to see who you are searching for.

Some people do not like this and some do. Let's take you to the forums: WebmasterWorld

I must quote Jeremy, "Goodbye Mapquest", and hello Google Maps. I am messing around with it, this is really extremely easy to use, and its so damn geeky! I did a search on my company, "rustybrick, suffern, ny", and it brought up related matches and the exact match as letter "A". Then I clicked on A and it plotted it on the map, actually, just check out what I did with this little movie I made in QuickTime format named Google Maps to RustyBrick (12MB).

Current forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch and JimWorld so far.

It is also always great to hear what Danny has to say about these things.

Great move by Ask Jeeves, in my opinion. Its just too bad they can't keep a secret. Everyone was bussing about the rumored purchase of bloglines by ask jeeves a few days before they officially announced it.

Here is a nice quote from the announcement:

"Bloglines is not only a market leader in feed aggregation and blog search, but it is truly one of the most useful and addictive services on the entire Web. We are excited about providing Bloglines with the resources to grow its service and help it reach a broader audience," said Jim Lanzone, Ask Jeeves' senior vice president of search properties. "Bloglines is a natural fit for our multi-brand portfolio, as we extend our information retrieval services to encompass the rapidly growing amount of dynamic content and information available in the blogosphere."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.

I think, I might, switch from MyYahoo to Bloglines, it seems to be more popular based on my stats. I know one can not make judgments based on one site's rss feed. But its worth a try.

I left out the official word from the new Ask Jeeves Blog.

I have been following a good variety of threads lately on several of the search engine forums, detailing some of the aftermath of the latest Google update. Most of you are familiar with some of the latest changes. I wanted to highlight some of the most active threads across the forum space. This morning the moderators on SEOchat were having a discussion on the impact of this past update and what we were experiencing first hand. If you are one of the lucky ones, some have reported that their traffic has doubled within the last week and remained consistent since that time or before that.

If you are on the opposite side of the situation, your site has suffered completely either by dropping out completely or by being pushed back to the oblivion where no one is going to find your site. So what is going on?? One particular thread on SEOchat started off by a member asking how to get their site back in Google. The thread quickly turned into a testimonial page of all the people that had their site dropped from the index. While some of this behavior is nothing new to SEO's, the gap between those sites that are experiencing increased traffic levels and those dropping out is getting more wide spread. Many are left without any indication why their site has been dropped. Initial observations of these sites do not tell much as to why they are dropping specifically. Many people are asking about on-page factors initially as reasons why, but its looking to be other reasons.

Some threads on the topic this week:

Out of the Sandbox - Cre8asite Forums
Google Update? - Cre8asite Forums
Possible Theories Regarding Google's Change In Serps - SEOchat
Too All Dropped Sites... - SEOchat
Google Update Allegra - WMW
Google Links Drop Big Time - Digitalpoint
Seeing Strange Serps - Digitalpoint
Site Disappeared From Google Index! - V7N

After reading those you might take a look at the post Barry posted last week on Latent Semantic Indexing as a possible factor that may be influencing this past current update. It's definately worth a closer look to understand the possibly why sites are dropping and others are doing so much better.

I got to run to a meeting, so I won't be able to update this site for a few hours. Found this post at Cre8asite that seems interesting, it is named A small speed test for the three major SE's.

Speak to you all later.

We knew MSN would spend big to advertise the new engine, they even had a TV spot in the SuperBowl (I really wanted the Eagles to win). It also looks like MSN dressed up their search page for the big day.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch and some others listed in the entry linked to above.

This is what is coming across the news wire, originally from Napsterization, who said this is supposed to be announced this coming Tuesday, Ask Jeeves will acquire Bloglines. I did scratch my head when the two links on the main navigation at the new Ask Jeeves Blog were to Bloglines. Also, if this is true, it would be great for Ask Jeeves. I believe that the majority of my RSS reader blog traffic comes from Bloglines, I do not know for sure if Bloglines is the most widely used RSS reader out there.

Josh from RepriseMedia posted this news at the Search Engine Watch Forums as well as at his blog named SearchViews. It also looks like the major news wires are picking it up, such as BusinessWeek.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! at a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Rackspace hates Yahoo? Or Vice Versa? said:

We did some further testing and our crawler IPs are in fact blocked from Rackspace.

Tim said this happens quote often with hosting companies. He continues by explaining, "A customer of a hosting company like rackspace may have a customer that is being hit by our crawler and not realize who it is so they report the IP to rackspace or another provider and they block the IP at the router level."

And to think that a few years ago, I actually had a few clients sign up with RackSpace, good thing they canceled soon after.

During all this fun at Google, there is a backlink update underway.

Forum Threads:

• DigitalPoint
  
• SEO Chat
  
• V7

A member at WebmasterWorld asked how he can remove a URL from the Yahoo! index. Tim, from Yahoo!, posted a URL to the answer.

• create a "robots.txt" file on your web site to prevent our crawler from indexing your site
• add a "noindex" meta tag to your documents
• remove the original document from your web site
• host the document on a secure section of your web site (HTTPS or login)

But the old URL may always remain in the index, due to the fact that there are links to that URL as a reference. "Under most circumstances, Yahoo! will not manually remove sites or pages from the index as we do not have the means to verify the validity and authority of each request."

Nick, the creator of a new great forum/blog named ThreadWatch posted an entry named WebmasterWorld Register Threadwatch.net - Is this a Wind Up?. Basically, it looks like someone over at WebmasterWorld, affiliated with searchengineworld.com, Brett Tabke, owner of WebmasterWorld - purchased the .net extension of the ThreadWatch.org domain name.

There is speculation that Brett commented at the entry. Nothing like good old forum cat fights. :)

{update} Brett informed me that he did this to secure the domain for threadwatch. He also purchased the seroundtable varations and offered to transfer it to me at cost.

Yesterday I wrote an entry named Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) - Crawl into the Google Algorithm?, where I discussed how the current theories behind the Google SERP changes have to do with a new algorithm shift for Google. Now many believe that this has a lot to do with Latent Semantic Indexing. So now, as a SEO, if you haven't already, its time to read up on all the papers on this topic. I, Brian posted a new thread with resources to papers on the topic, he thanks SEW Moderator Marcia for the help with the papers. I'll list links to those papers below. Then Ammon Johns posts a quote from one source that really does a great job summarizing the topic. In addition, he posts to a thread on this topic started in 2002 at Cre8asite Forums named The Semantic Web.

Here is the snippet Ammon quoted in the SEW thread:

Regular keyword searches approach a document collection with a kind of accountant mentality: a document contains a given word or it doesn't, with no middle ground. We create a result set by looking through each document in turn for certain keywords and phrases, tossing aside any documents that don't contain them, and ordering the rest based on some ranking system. Each document stands alone in judgement before the search algorithm - there is no interdependence of any kind between documents, which are evaluated solely on their contents.


Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn't understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.


When you search an LSI-indexed database, the search engine looks at similarity values it has calculated for every content word, and returns the documents that it thinks best fit the query. Because two documents may be semantically very close even if they do not share a particular keyword, LSI does not require an exact match to return useful results. Where a plain keyword search will fail if there is no exact match, LSI will often return relevant documents that don't contain the keyword at all.


[ Source: http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/lsa_definition.htm]

Here are a listing of papers on the LSA topic from the thread:

• Latent Semantic Indexing at Tennessee Uni
  
• Latent semantic indexing from NITLE
  
• Constructing and Examining Personalized Cooccurrence-based Thesauri on Web Pages
  
• Telcordia Latent Semantic Indexing
  
• From Latent Semantics to Spatial Hypertext
  
• Using Latent Semantic Indexing for Information Filtering
  

Added: Check out SEO Book's LSI post, very detailed and easy to read. Good work.

Last night, I received an email from Peter Da Vanzo, you know the guy who started that new cool directory named Rubber Stamped. Well in a blog entry he named First Rule of Adsense he mentions a thread over at WebmasterWorld about people noticing two things:

(1) Drop in AdSense Revenue
(2) Drop in AdWords Relevancy

Are they related, probably.

The thread gets really interesting, tons of those fun theories.

As I mentioned in my comment in an earlier entry named Ask Jeeves Goes Blogging, JeevesGuy came out for the first time under his real name at WebmasterWorld under the name Kaushal Kurapati. I waited for the blog post at the new Ask Jeeves blog to say anything. Check out the entry named JeevesGuy Exposed!.

Good Work Ask Jeeves. It is great to hear from Teoma.

Earlier today, I started a little theory on the sandbox dieing, well, there is a ton of smart forum discussion going on in a thread at SEW Forums that I renamed to Major Google Changes: Latent Semantic Analysis?. Now, bakedjack has been really driving the thread into a discussion on LSA.

First let me quote some of randfish post on what LSA is about:

The idea behind this is that by taking a huge composite (index) of millions of web pages, the search engines can "learn" which words are related and which noun concepts relate to one another.


For example, using LSA, a search engine would recognize that trips to the zoo often include viewing wildlife and animals, possibly as part of a tour.


Now, conduct a search at Google for ~zoo ~trips. Note the bolded words match the terms I italicized in the paragraph above. Google is bolding 'related' terms and recognizing which terms that frequently occur concurrently (together / on the same page / in close proximity) in their index.


Some forms of LSA are too computationally expensive. For example, Google isn't smart enough to 'learn' the way some of the newer learning computers do at MIT (see some news reports on this). They cannot, for example, learn through their index that Zebras and Tigers are both examples of striped animals, although they may realize that stripes and zebra are more semanticly connected then ducks and stripes.

Very well done.

Chatting with Ammon Johns earlier today that said that a search engine can perform LSA two ways (more then two but here are two):
(1) The way Teoma does it with Hubs and Communities
(2) Looking at the words on a page, around the links, and seeing how they are related. Well, its best explained by a my coverage of the Super Session: History of SEO/SEM Theory and Testing - WMW Conf 7, where Daron Babin (aka SEGuru) was reported saying, "He recommends writing a page of content and pulling out the keywords, then give it to someone and ask them to figure out what they keyword is. He said its about the other words on the page, its that important. If the keyword is "apple" is the page about computers or fruit?"

More is being looked at with this in the thread.

I think, not 100%, since there are no forum threads speculating, but....

I believe, the Google sandbox is done with! - Maybe :)

Why do I say so. Well, about a handful of sites I launched within the year, all sandboxed for [company name] are now all ranking #1 for [company name].

The thread coverage is about new changes at Google, but I think this is directly related to the sandbox.

I hope to have more "proof" for you, with client permission, as soon as possible.

Let me know if you have sites that seem to have dug out of the box.

Update: forum threads linked to in this entry mention the sandbox.

Yesterday, I started to notice that my Google traffic for this particular site has come back to its normal level (maybe a little less then normal) from about 3 or 4 weeks ago. But I am not the only one who noticed this, folks over at WebmasterWorld have a 8 page thread (within 26 hours since its creation date) named Major changes in google update..starting?. In addition, there is a five page thread at SEO Chat and eight pages at Digital Point - keep in mind, different forums show different number of posts per page.

Its interesting because some speculate that Google is now assigning less weight to links. It is hard to know for sure at this time, let's keep watching.

A great tool to compare data center results is over at McDar's Google DataCenter Watch Page.

Yesterday, a IHelpYou Forum thread named MSN search ads everywhere today discussed the wide spread imprints of MSN Search advertisements throughout the Web. I noticed Google AdWords & AdSense ads for MSN that read "Try The New MSN Search" - "It's More Precise and More Powerful Find Just What You're After." Do a search at Google on "search engine" to see what I mean or see below:

Now, according to Robin Langford at NetImperative, MSN Search begins TV campaign.

The campaign features the slogan “Find it at MSN.co.uk”.

The supporting TV advertising campaign will be aired on a broad range of channels, including Channel 4 and ITV. The first phase will run from 7 February for a number of weeks with a second phase towards the summer.

Forum discussion on the TV ads at WebmasterWorld.

Even before MSN Launched there has been a lot of chatter about what works well in MSN. There are many, many threads out there with ideas and tips, here is a listing of a few:

• Search Engine Watch
• HighRankings
• SEO Chat
• WebmasterWorld

Here is a quick list from these threads:
- inbound anchor text seems to be huge
- msn treats graphic links well
- freshness of the links (do they dare deploy temporal link analysis? - doubt it)
- on page seems to be looked at, but not as much as those fancy links

A thread at SEO Chat describes how members are very pleased with the speed of the new MSN Search Engine in crawling and then indexing the new pages. My personal tests do not show that it is any faster then Google, but SEO Chat members feel that MSN is faster then Google and the other engines at indexing new Web pages. Some quotes:

I have been watching several recently launched site with very unique names (that previously had 0 results at all SEs). MSN has indexed the most pages both on the site(s) and mentioning them. They have crawled more than 10 times the number of pages that Google or Yahoo! have.

Yes, I've recently lauched a new website (about a week or two) with 22 pages and all were crawled in the next day by MSN. Google only has 11 pages and Yahoo! doesn't have a single one!

Yahoo! just announced a new beta tool named Y!Q BETA, which enables "search by example" function, basically contextual search. Chris Sherman has an extensive write up on this. Many of you, about 30%, use firefox, so try out the firefox plugin for it. Jeremy Z. has a big write up on this at the Y! Search Blog.

For forum coverage, I recommend checking out the Search Engine Watch thread, where Chris Sherman, Nacho Hernandez, Detlev Johnson, Daniel Brandt and Danny Sullivan all comment.

Other forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and SEO Chat and Cre8asite.

I was hoping that Mr. Jeeves would start a blog. It is really great to see they have joined the bandwagon. The Ask Jeeves blog looks really great, personally, I think they fit it into their Ask Jeeves brand better then the other three search blogs. The first and only entry as of now on the new blog is named Hey, Look What We Found: The Official Ask Jeeves Blog!, written by Erik Collier, Data Engineering Manager.

Hmm...and they look like they are using the nofollow tag in the comment links. I guess they are being kind to the other engines that have link spam issues (see Ask Jeeves Response to the Nofollow Attribute For Links).

This blog will be a great chance for SEMs to understand Ask Jeeves.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Also the SEW Blog has a link to the xml feed, which is http://blog.ask.com/index.rdf.

Kim Krause, a great person, who happens to have a great blog on usability and sem, was awarded the blog of the month by TechSmith Corporation. Check it out at the bottom of the page, it says:

Blog of the Month
Cre8pc: Intriguing blab about usability, seo, web dev, search engines, and Internet stuff. Cre8pc Blog

Well deserved! Kim talks about this award at her blog.

Earlier today, I wrote an entry named Theories on Advanced Link Mapping with Google Registrar, which basically said there were some out there that believe Google wants to be a registrar to have access to the contact information of every single domain name listed out there.

Nick Wilsdon from e3Internet just emailed me to tell me:
(1) He was not able to comment here because the image access code is missing. Now I know why I haven't had a comment this week. I will fix that soon.

(2) I'll just quote him:

Just been talking to Ross Radar (Tucows) – regarding this article:

This will be in the public archives soon enough but as a reseller registrar for them we are on their direct discussion list.

His answer -

Registrars only have access to the data they collect. There is no master list.

Most likely, as he suggests, Google has become a registrar to take care of their own corporate registration requirements just like Amazon did.

Just thought you might want to add that to stop the speculation. I tried adding a comment but the security image is missing – which admittedly does give you a very high level of spam comment protection ;)

Thank you Nick for emailing me directly.

Thought this was kinda interesting and might be of interest to a few people here. A member at SEOchat noticed a new position available from Yahoo for a search engine marketing manager. Now while, Yahoo is not the hottest place to work in comparison to Google. It is a darn fine option. In order to qualify you need to know the following:

Search Engine Marketing Manager

Yahoo! is looking for an experienced marketing professional to provide strategic leadership, tactical execution, and analytic support surrounding the development of a search engine marketing (SEM) program across Yahoo!'s Media, Entertainment, Information & Finance division. The person we seek will create, implement, track, analyze, and optimize keyword campaigns across multiple search engines while developing the company?s overall paid search strategy. As a key member of the marketing team, you will play a central role in driving customer acquisition, revenue growth, and profitability. The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience managing large scale search engine marketing campaigns.

Oh, and you definately need to this to apply:

-A passion for Yahoo! products and services

And rightly so, Apple is a leader in branding. Of course, Google has a huge impact on the World, but Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask Jeeves have been taking small bites out of Google's market share. Apple, well, they are happy with their 2 - 4% market share, but their brand - well, its huge.

After a two-year hiatus Apple has returned to win the 2004 Readers’ Choice Awards for the brand with the most global impact—a title held by Google since 2002. It’s hard to imagine a brand having a shinier year than Apple. Notably punctuated with iMacs, iPods and iTunes, Apple’s 2004 presence was felt in the press, in ads and on the streets, with iPod coming to define the word “ubiquitous.” Coupled with strong revenue, Apple reported a net profit of US$ 295 million in the last quarter of 2004 alone and a 2004 overall net income growth of 300 percent. Yes, 300 percent.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day I reported on the topic; Google is a Domain Name Registrar. I was speaking with Shawn Hogan, you know the DigitalPoint guy, about this topic yesterday afternoon. He feels that Google's motives are not to become a domain name registrar to sell names at $10 a pop but rather to easily get real information about domain names. Supposedly, a registrar has access to the detailed contact, billing and administrative information that are assigned to all domain names that are registered, no matter if you are the registrar for that domain name or not. Shawn thinks, as do others, that they will use this information to track down link spammers and fight spam at a higher level.

I wonder if they would do evil? Is it evil? I need to find a forum thread that discusses this particular topic, I am sure there are.

Update: Looks like the folks at WebmasterWorld are cooking up some nice conspiracy theories.

Affiliate programs are one of the most successful methods to drive sales for a Web site. So why not? Why can't Google start an affiliate program for its AdWords and AdSense programs?

Google joined the affiliate bandwagon, with the announcement of a new Google Referral Program. Basically for every AdWords advertiser and every AdSense publisher you refer to them AND "Advertisers qualify as completed referrals after they spend $20 with AdWords. Publishers qualify after they earn $75 in AdSense revenue." you make $20. To bad its not a percentage of the spend or clicks. :)

Now, which SEO will outrank Google for "AdWords" and "AdSense" in its own engine? :)

Currently, forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

I get a email notification that I have gmail, I login in the morning and its a reader telling me about a new layout in gmail's interface. Basically, they moved the gmail invite box to the bottom left corner, and made it quicker to send out invites. Here is an image of the new layout.

Why did they make it quicker?

Well, I also noticed that I have 50, yes FIVE ZERO, gmail invites to give away.

So if you want, I know 99% of you already have, a gmail invite, please leave a comment with your:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Current Email Address

Even if you have one, get your kids, friends, and coworkers gmail addresses!

I sound like an ad, don't I?

Update: I have given everyone who has requested an invite an invite and will continue to do so.

Update Free Gmail: Google no longer requires invites, go to here to learn more.

Patrick Gavin, informed me that he just released a free 11 page PDF document named, The Definitive Guide to Link Buying.

I reviewed an early draft, some nice points in the document. This published version is much prettier.

An other thread at HighRankings for today. Basically, this thread is from an individual who posts that they have "Run Out Of Link Partners/exchanges." Of course, that is basically impossible. With the number of Web sites out there and methods to build links, its simply impossible.

So if you feel that you've run out of link building ideas, visit the link building category archive of this site. Also feel free to hook up with the sponsors on the left side of this page. Hey, this morning, I had over 800 trackback link spams to delete - be creative. :)

HighRanking's forum is really great, some of the forum threads are so basic, that it really makes you think about the fundamentals - which, as many of you know, helps with the more complex areas of a topic. I think that is why many top level professors like to teach the introductory course and the very complex courses. Back on topic...

In a thread at HighRankings, a member asks if there is a difference between having two hyphens in a URL compared to one. Well, a hyphen is considered a space - although the member thinks hyphens are not a space, they are. In the thread, it seems as if, the member feel that two hyphens would make a plus sign. Elementary math, two negatives make a positive ( - * - = +). Wouldn't that be cool?

Anyway, two hyphens just equal two spaces. For example; domain.com/new-york--jets.html would translate to New York Jets. Not sure if you noticed two spaces between "York" and "Jets". But then again, do keywords in URLs help with rankings? That is a debate that has been going on since before SEOs were called SEOs (but back then they did weight in a lot).

The questions currently being asked at HighRanking Forums are:

(1) Does a search engine index a password protected (on open document) PDF document?
(2) Does a search engine index a print & edit protected PDF document?

One would assume that in the first case, of a view password protected PDF document, the search engine would not index the document. In the second case, one would thing the search engine does index it, but does not provide a cache of the page for HTML view.

The tests are currently being done and the results will be posted at the thread.

A post at Search Engine Watch forums, shows that Yahoo!'s Cofounder, Jerry Yang is to speak at the upcoming SES NY 05 Show. This information comes by way of the latest Search Engine Report released last night. Yahoo!'s founder will be speaking in the Keynote Address Tuesday morning. Of course, I will be providing detailed coverage, with Ben (Phoenix).

I wonder if Google will put up their founders at future shows? Great work Yahoo!, simply smart!

The official word is out (late last night - 11:30 west coast time), MSN Search is officially out of beta. In addition, Microsoft redesigned the MSN homepage and "added the ability to access MSN Search from the Microsoft.com homepage." Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up on the engine at Search Engine Watch, in addition, Gary notes some of what MSN calls direct answers.

Forum coverage:

• Search Engine Watch
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• SEO Chat
  
• DigitalPoint Forums
  

more to come.